Last week I flew out to New York for the Progressive F# Tutorials NYC hosted by Skills Matter and organised by Richard Minerich. The event was held in the atmospheric Liberty Hall event space at the Ace hotel in mid-town Manhattan, and not far from the Empire State Building.
Keynote
Don Syme kicked off proceedings with a keynote on Being Successful with Functional-first techniques in Finance (you can check out the video of a broadly similar talk at the Progressive .Net Tutorials in London). In the talk Don outlines key areas in which F# is used to solve:
- Time to market
- Complexity
- Correctness
- Effeciency
F# Koans
Chris Marinos started off the beginner’s track with the excellent F# Koans which aim to teach you F# through testing. Based on the Ruby Koans, Chris provides the F# Koans for free on github.
F# Katas
Chris then followed on after lunch with a member of the audience on a data mining Kata where the goals was to extract specific data from a text file. Then I introduced the next Kata, Conway’s Game of Life via an epic video I found on YouTube:
By the end of the session there were plenty of complete implementations including one in OCaml, which is quite close to F#.
Here’s a few blog entries I have with example implementations in F#:
Apparently the 127 character version made a cameo at NDC Oslo on Friday last week too:
Thanks to Vagif Abilov for the mention and Richard Dalton for the picture.