I think BASIC's greatest strength may be that it was something that many people -- not just those with a particular background -- could learn. There was no gatekeeper, either literally or figuratively: you didn't have to push punchcards under a bank-teller window nor did you have to learn recursion before learning …

Not at all surprisingly, it turns out that F# events need not be the crufty structures I showed in my previous post.

First, Xamarin's David Siegel suggested "Let the Event type be inferred, don't define a delegate type, and send simple typed values rather than EventArgs:"

open System

type Control …

tl;dr: F# has a long learning curve (it takes a long time to master) but productivity happens quickly.

I recently wrote my first real application in F#. Although I've been using F# for many of my scripting needs for about a year and use F# to explore iOS APIs …

One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

I think when people saw that Dart was from Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak there was an expectation that Dart was going to be a grand synthesis: a blazingly-fast NewSpeak-with-curly-brackets. It’s very much not such a language. It doesn’t seem, academically, vastly innovative because it doesn’t add …

Gilad Bracha started the day’s Dynamic Languages Symposium with an invited talk on Dart, a new Web programming language (read: JavaScript replacement) in which “Sophisticated Web Applications need not be a tour de force.”

OOPSLA is attended by academics, who are typically less interested in the surface appearance of …

I am in Portland for OOPSLA / SPLASH, a conference that is my sentimental favorite. I think my first OOPSLA was in New Orleans circa 1990 and OOPSLA Vancouver 92 is filled with memories (mostly because Tina came and we dove Orcas Island in wetsuits).

OOPSLA is traditionally the big academic …

Taking my own 15 Exercises to Know A Programming Language as a starting point for my exploration of Scala...

The first set of exercises are right up the alley of a language with pattern-matching and list-processing:

Write a program that takes as its first argument one of the words ‘sum …

It sounds like someone designed a programming language with the express intention of intriguing me:

FunLoft is an experimental language for concurrent programming, designed with the following objectives:

• make concurrent programming simpler by providing a framework with a clear and sound semantics.
• provide a safe language, in which, for example …

2009 was definitely a mixed bag for us, as was, I suppose, the "aughts."In other words, life.

Out with the old:

in with the new!