A couple of days ago, I stumbled across the Wonderland Clojure Katas, by @gigasquid. It’s a wonderful project, with 7 independent coding exercises, inspired by Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland”. I love that type of stuff, and saw that @byronsamaripa had already made a Scala port, so I figured, why not port it to F#?
More...A couple of weeks ago, I came across this blog post by Steve Shogren, which looks at various programming languages, and attempts to define a “language safety score”, by taking into account a list of language criteria (Are nulls allowed? Can variables be mutated? And so on), aggregating them into an overall safety score – and finally looking for whether the resulting score was a reasonable predictor for the observed bug rate across various projects.
More...As much as we people who write code like to talk about code, the biggest challenge in a software project is not code. A project rarely fails because of technology – it usually fails because of miscommunications: the code that is delivered solves a problem (sometimes), but not the right one. One of the reasons we often deliver the wrong solution is that coding involves translating the world of the original problem into a different language. Translating one way is hard enough as it is, but then, rarely are users comfortable with reading and interpreting code – and as a result, confirming whether the code “does the right thing” is hard, and errors go un-noticed.
This is why the idea of Ubiquitous Language, coined by Eric Evans in his Domain Driven Design book, always appealed to me. The further apart the languages of the domain expert and the code are, the more likely it is that something will be lost in translation.
More...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.
More...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.
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