Figure 1. The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander Many programmers know the name of the architect Christopher Alexander for his work on design patterns that has been adapted into the world of programming. A lot of people know of the, sometimes ridiculed, patterns like strategy (functions!) or visitor (pattern matching!) and some have read the Gang of Four design patterns book that introduced them. A few people know of the Patterns of Software book by Richard P. Gabriel, which is a much more profound reflection on software inspired by the work of Christopher Alexander. And almost ..read more

Figure 1. Virtually eliminates your coding load. FLOW-MATIC promotional brochure (1957) No-code is a hot new topic for programming startups. The idea is to develop a system that allows end-users to do the programming they need without the difficult task of writing code. There are no-code systems for building mobile apps, analysing data and many more. It is perhaps not a surprise that "eliminating programming load" is not as new idea as some people may think and there is an excellent blog series on no-code history by Instadeq, going back to 1959. Funnily enough, the 1957 promotional brochure ..read more

The F# Software Foundation condemns, in the strongest terms, the unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military. The Russian government's actions endanger the lives of millions of innocent people. We call on Russia to end this injustice ..read more

At Fetch we reward you for taking pictures of store and restaurant receipts. Our app needs to read and understand crumpled, dark, smudged, warped, skewed, creased, you get the “picture” images, taken in cars, in your lap, on the way out, while walking the dog, taking out the trash, doing your nails, etc.., etc. Not ..read more

Happy new year from the F# Software Foundation! Along with my personal thanks for another wonderful year, I am excited to share some new developments with all of you in the community ..read more

F# Advent Calendar is a long tradition in F# community F# Advent Calendar in English: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 F# Advent Calendar (in Japanese): 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 that became an inspiration for C# Advent Calendar and for Q# Advent Calendar and many others. Christmas is approaching again, and now is ..read more

I started to learn how to program in high school at the end of the 1990s using a mix of BASIC, Turbo Pascal and HTML with JavaScript. The seed for this blog post comes from my experience with learning how to program in JavaScript, without having much guidance or organized resources. This article continues a theme that I started in my interactive Commodore 64 article, which is to look at past programming systems and see what interesting past ideas have been lost in contemporary systems. Unlike with Commodore 64, which I first used in 2018 in the Seattle Living Computers museum, my perspective o ..read more

Each year the F# Software Foundation holds elections for its Board of Trustees. The role of the Board is to oversee the vision and mission of the F# Software Foundation, to set the goals, and to appoint officers to run the daily operations as appropriate. It is now time for our members to choose who will represent them as the Board of Trustees for 2021-2022 ..read more

While the physicists investigate the nature of the mysterious portal that has recently appeared in North London, several human beings recently came through the portal, which appears to be a gate into an alternative universe. As we understood from the last two people coming through the portal, it seems to be a linked with a universe that is in many ways like ours, reached about the same level of social and technological development, but differs in numerous curious details. The paths through which people in this alternative universe reached similar results as our world are often subtly different ..read more

During the weekends I decided to take a look at what ML.NET can propose in the area of recommendation engine. I found a nice picture in Mark Farragher’s blog post that explains three available options: The choice depends on what information you have. If you have sophisticated user feedback like rating (or likes and most ..read more