Taking a peek at F# on StackOverflow

I got curious the other day about how to measure the F# community growth, and thought it could be interesting to take a look at this through StackOverflow. As it turns out, it’s not too hard to get some data, because StackExchange exposes a nice API, which allows you to make all sorts of queries and get a JSON response back.

As a starting point, I figured I would just try to get the number of questions asked per month. The API allows you to retrieve questions on any site, by tag, between arbitrary dates. Responses are paged: you can get up to 100 items per page, and keep asking for next pages until there is nothing left to receive. That sounds like a perfect job for the FSharp.Data JSON Type Provider.

Catch of the Month, April 2015

About a month ago, I vaguely recall a discussion on Twitter – if memory serves me, @rickasaurus was involved – around sharing articles. This inspired me to try something. Every morning, I start my day with an espresso first, followed by reading blog posts for half an hour or so. While I get a lot from these quick reading sessions, I rarely go back to the material afterwards, and thought it would be interesting to keep track of a few, and revisit them at the end of the month. I also decided I would primarily focus on slightly out-of-topic areas, that is, pieces with ideas loosely connected to my daily work, but which I found inspiring or stimulating.

Rewriting a Logistic Regression from C# to F#, part 2

In our previous post, we looked at James McCaffrey’s code, “Gradient Descent Training Using C#” from MSDN magazine, and took a stab at rewriting the first part in F#, to clarify a bit the way the dataset was created. Today, we’ll dive in the second block, which implements the logistic regression using gradient descent. Again, we won’t discuss why the algorithm works – the article does a pretty good job at that – and focus instead purely on the F# / C# conversion part.

Rewriting a Logistic Regression from C# to F#, part 1

I will admit it, I got a bit upset by James McCaffrey’s column in MSDN magazine this month, “Gradient Descent Training Using C#”. While the algorithm explanations are quite good, I was disappointed by the C# sample code, and kept thinking to myself “why oh why isn’t this written in F#”. This is by no means intended as a criticism of C#; it’s a great language, but some problems are just better suited for different languages, and in this case, I couldn’t fathom why F# wasn’t used.

First impressions with DiffSharp, an F# autodiff library

A few weeks ago, I came across DiffSharp, an automatic differentiation library in F#. As someone whose calculus skills have always been rather mediocre (thanks Wolfram Alpha!), but who needs to deal with gradients and the like on a regular basis because they are quite useful in machine learning and numerical methods, the project looked pretty interesting: who wouldn’t want exact and efficient calculations of derivatives? So I figured I would take a couple of hours to experiment with the library. This post is by no means an in-depth evaluation, but rather intended as “notes from the road” from someone entirely new to DiffSharp.