Beginning F#: Card Tricks. Hen attempting to learn a new computer language, it's difficult to find a problem that's both interesting enough to bother working with and also simple enough to let you concentrate on language rather than logic. Fortunately, it turns out you can learn a lot about F# with a deck of playing cards. This article shows how to create a simple F# application that shuffles a deck and displays the cards in the console window.
Along the way you'll explore:Discriminated unionsTuplesLists and list sequence expressionsFunctions and recursionPattern matching and functional polymorphismGetting Started Visual Studio gives you the option to create F# applications and class libraries, and has an integrated window running F# Interactive. F# will eventually be available as a standalone Visual Studio Express Edition product. If you're using Visual Studio, create a new F# Application project named DevX.Cards.PartI. Click View → Other Windows → F# Interactive to display the integrated F# Interactive window. Awesome F# - Decision Trees – Part I - Chris Smith's completely unique view. Programming F# is out! Meaning you can, and should, go to the store and pick up a copy today. With Programming F# serving as a solid guide for the F# Language, I’d like to start posting less about language features and more about applications.
That is, what can you do with this awesome language. This is the first blog post in a series titled Awesome F#. These posts will provide advanced, real-world applications of the F# language to do awesome things. This post is about Decision Trees and the ID3 algorithm, motivated by this question on StackOverflow.com.
If you want to learn more about data mining and machine learning THE BOOK you need to get is Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell. Defining the Problem So what does the ID3 algorithm do? In addition to helping plan your sports activities, decision trees are an easy way to gather business intelligence. This is a situation where you want to apply data mining to extract meaning from the data. The Approach Enter the Mathematics Entropy Or 0.9182. Adventures in F# - F# 101 Part 2 - Matthew Podwysocki's Blog.
Update: Added more topics I know it's been a little bit too long since I began this series from when I continued, but plenty of distractions came up along the way. I intend to go a little deeper today into what functional programming means and why you should care. As always, check out my previous post on the matter here. Getting Sidetracked Last night at the DC ALT.NET meeting, Craig Andera and I discussed Lisp, F# and functional programming as a whole. His language of the year was Lisp and I thought that was an interesting choice of the language to learn, but when you think about it, most good things in programming lead back to SmallTalk and Lisp...
I had been hearing a bit about IronScheme, the IronLisp rewrite, so of course I had to check it out. Basic Introduction So, just in case you missed the idea of functional programming and what it means, I have a few posts on where you should start here: The Joys of Currying Now as you can see, it created the multiply function. The Odd Tuple. Download details: Microsoft F#, November 2010 Community Technology Preview. Robert Pickering's F# Resources.
F# Developer Center. F# Downloads. These pages are the historical home of F# at Microsoft Research. For the latest information on F# today, see the links to the right. F# brings you type safe, succinct, efficient, and expressive functional programming language. This simple and pragmatic language has particular strengths in data-oriented programming, parallel I/O programming, parallel CPU programming, scripting, and algorithmic development. It enables you to access a huge library and tools base and comes with a strong set of development tools. Microsoft Research contributes to F# through the language design and Try F#. F# is open source under an OSI-approved license (Apache 2.0) and is available across multiple platforms through the F# Software Foundation. Microsoft make free Visual F# Tools for Visual Studio and these tools are also included in Visual Studio Professional and Ultimate. F# originated at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.
For more information on using F# today, see the links to the right.