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Partial Application

This post was supposed to be about Partial Active Patterns, but before we get to that, I want to take a small diversion to cover Partial Application of Active Patterns (which is a completely different thing). Confused? Don’t worry. Read on. Partial Application I’ve described Partial Application in detail here and here, so I’m going to assume that you know how it works for regular functions. Please read those two posts if you are in any doubt.

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Pattern Matching

This is the first in a series of posts explaining Active Patterns, a very cool feature of F#. This post will lay the groundwork by covering pattern matching, and introducing the concept of active patterns. Subsequent posts will cover the various types of active pattern in detail. Destructuring Assignment Thanks to Miles McGuire for setting me straight on the name. F# is full of little nice ideas that you appreciate when you come from a C# background, and destructuring assignment is one of them.

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Single Total With Params (|A|) x

We move on to the next in our series on Active Patterns, but this time we’re really just covering a slight modification to the Single Total pattern that we covered in the last post. All the same rules apply, we’re just adding the ability to add parameters to the Active Pattern. I say ‘parameters’ but in reality I mean ‘additional parameters’. Every Active Pattern has at least one parameter. The ‘x’ in ‘match x with’ has to go somewhere.

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My 5 Biggest Mistakes

You can’t work in this business for very long before the hope, idealism and intellectual curiosity is beaten out of you and replaced with TPS Sheets, and 15 different tools for telling your colleagues how to configure IIS so that your app will actually run on their machine. If you’re new to this business there may still be time to save yourself. Go drive a truck, or learn a bit about your city and become a tour guide.

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Maps and Sets

In the most recent post in this series I implemented Tic-Tac-Toe using recursion to find the best moves. The point of that post was the recursion and I took the simplest approach I could think of to represent the actual board and moves. I used two lists of ints, one for each player’s list of occupied squares. The board itself wasn’t explicitly represented at all, it could be inferred from the two lists.

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Fly The Damn Plane

Constant Learning Being a software developer means constant learning. The technical landscape is always shifting. We have to run to stand still. We know this. We accept it. For some it’s the very thing that attracts them to the profession. I’ve learned lots about software development in the last few years. How to automate builds How to automate tests Object Oriented Programming/Design Functional Programming/Design Operating Systems Programming Languages Frameworks Version Contol Systems I’ve tried to embrace Agile, hell I’m even a certified Scrum Master.

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Single Total (|A|)

Part 1 of this series was mainly sharpening the axe by covering some basics like Pattern matching. I also gave a general sense of what active patterns are (functions that can be used when pattern matching, such as in match expressions). Now it’s time to dig into the details. As I mentioned previously there are arguably 5 variations of active patterns. This post will cover the first of those, the Single Total Active Pattern.

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Recursion

This post looks at a hugely important part of functional programming, Recursion. In simple terms this means writing a function that calls itself. There are endless examples of using recursion to figure out Fibonacci numbers, or process lists. This post will be a little more complicated but hopefully is simple enough that you’ll be able to follow along. We’re going to teach F# to play the perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game is a favourite for kids, but it quickly becomes boring for adults.

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Understanding The Four Rules Of Simple Design

I don’t normally review books, mainly because when it comes to technical books I rarely manage to read them in their entirety. I have however just finished “Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design” by Corey Haines and since it’s self published, and promoted pretty much exclusively through word of mouth, I thought it might be worth a short review. The “4 Rules” mentioned in the title are the XP Simplicity Rules:

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The Happy Path

Every movement needs an enemy, it galvanises followers, gives a community a sense of some shared identity. Even if Group A aspire to nothing more than to not be like Group B that is at least something to rally around. “The Waterfall” is increasingly becoming an Alamo for those who aren’t or don’t want to be convinced by talk of “Agile”. For the Agile community the designated enemy seems to be “The Waterfall Model” and the command and control project management techniques that usually go hand in hand with it.

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