Tomas Petricek

Searching for new ways of thinking in programming & working with data

I believe that the most interesting work is not the one solving hard problems, but the one changing how we think about the world. I follow this belief in my work on data science tools, functional programming and F# teaching, in my programming languages research and I try to understand it through philosophy of science.

The Gamma

I'm working on making data-driven storytelling easier, more open and reproducible at the Alan Turing Institute.

Consulting

I'm author of definitive F# books and open-source libraries. I offer my F# training and consulting services as part of fsharpWorks.

Academic

I published papers about theory of context-aware programming languages, type providers, but also philosophy of science.

Tomas Petricek
  • Tomas Petricek
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Data-driven storytelling

Everybody can use Excel, but creating a web-based data-driven story requires professional developers, if not a team. I'm working on making data-driven storytelling easier, more open and reproducible.

The Gamma is a research project to build tools that easily integrate with modern data sources (open government data, public online sources) and let users easily create visualizations that are directly linked to the data, making the visualizations more transparent, reproducible, but also easy to adapt to explore other aspects of the data.

  • Visualizing Olympic medalists is a demo that shows how such open data-driven articles could look like. It lets explores the history of Olympic medals.
  • Computation + Journalism 2015 paper about an earlier prototype describes ideas and motivations of the project in more details. Watch a 15 minute demo or a 45 minute talk from StrangeLoop.
  • The Gamma is on GitHub and everything is available under the MIT license. You can learn about the latest news on Twitter at @thegamma_net.

Trainings at fsharpWorks

I'm a frequent conference speaker, founding member of the F# Software Foundation author of C# and F# books and author of many definitive F# libraries. I have been Microsoft MVP since 2004 and used F# since early Microsoft Research versions.

Have you seen the F# testimo­nials and are you thinking how can your company also benefit from the safety, correctness, efficiency and faster time-to-market provided by F#?

  • fsharpWorks trainings — At fsharpWorks, we love sharing our knowledge with your team and we offer a wide range of workshops. We created an online course about F# in Finance and Type Providers and we regularly run an in-person course Fast Track to F# in London. We offer all of these and more as on-site trainings too — just drop us an email!
  • F# books and articles — I wrote Real World Functional Prog­ramming, which explains functional concepts using C# and F#, edited a collection of F# case studies: F# Deep Dives and also wrote a free O'Reilly report: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with F#.

Coeffects and research

I recently submitted my PhD thesis at University of Cambridge and I closely collaborate with the F# team in Microsoft Research Cambridge.

My recent publications cover a range of topics from theory of context-aware programming, F# and type providers to language extensions for concurrent, reactive and asynchronous programming.

  • Coeffects playgrouund is an interactive essay that lets you explore my PhD research in an accessible and fun way. You can read more in our ICFP 2014 paper.
  • Academic web page has links to other published papers, work-in-progress drafts, research talks and also information about student projects and courses that I supervised.

Philosophy of science

During my (computer science) PhD, I became interested in how programming language research is done and how it should be done. We tend to think that science has infallible methods for discovering the truth, but is that the case? Or is science more 'sloppy' and 'irrational' than its methodological image as Paul Feyerabend says?

  • History and philosophy of types is my most recent work in this area. It uses types as an example of a concept that appears simple, but is (and needs to be) more complex. Watch my LambdaDays talk or read the full-length Onward! essay.
  • Philosophy posts on my blog — start with philosophy and history books every computer scientist should read and come to some of the events organized by the HaPoC Comission.

What I'm doing — latest blogs & publications

Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#

Monday, 12 November 2018, 12:58 PM

I've been teaching F# for over seven years now, both in the public F# FastTrack course that we run at SkillsMatter in London and in various custom trainings for private companies. Every time I teach the F# FastTrack course, I modify the material in one way or another. I wrote about some of this interesting history last year in an fsharpWorks article. The course now has a stable half-day introduction to the language and a stable focus on the ideas behind functional-first programming, but there are always new examples and applications that illustrate this style of programming.

When we started, we mostly focused on teaching functional programming concepts that might be useful even if you use C# and on building analytical components that your could integrate into a larger .NET solution. Since then, the F# community has matured, established the F# Software Foundation, but also built a number of mature end-to-end ecosystems that you can rely on such as Fable, the F# to JavaScript compiler, and SAFE Stack for full-stack web development.

For the upcoming December course in London, I added a number of demos and hands-on tasks built using Fable, partly because running F# in a browser is an easy way to illustrate many concepts and partly because Fable has some amazing functional-first libraries.

If you are interested in learning F# and attending our course, the next F# FastTrack takes place on 6-7 December in London at SkillsMatter. We also offer custom on-site trainings. Get in touch at @tomaspetricek or email tomas@tomasp.net for a 10% discount for the course.

One of the new samples I want to show, which I also live coded at NDC 2018, is building a simple web-based Excel-like spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet demonstrates all the great F# features such as domain modeling with types, the power of compositionality and also how functional-first approach can be amazingly powerful for building user interfaces.

Read the complete article...

More writing on my blog

Here you'll find what I'm working on — my blog posts tend to be either updates about projects I'm working on, trainings and talks I'm doing, or longer posts that are early versions of my ideas — some of them become papers, some of them have been cited in other papers, some will be soon forgotten.

Programming as interaction: A new perspective for programming language research

Monday, 8 October 2018, 12:22 PM

In programming research, we say a lot about programs and languages, but very little about the actual process of programming. One simple trick that will make programming language research significantly more interesting is to think about programs not as expressions, but as a result of a sequence of interactions that create it. This includes usual things such as writing code and refactoring, but if we also include, say, running a part of the program, we become capable of saying many more interesting things and building new powerful programming tools.

Would aliens understand lambda calculus?

Tuesday, 22 May 2018, 10:27 AM

The question whether aliens would understand lambda calculus is intriguing because it vividly formulates a fundamental question about our formal mathematical knowledge. Are mathematical theories and results about them invented, i.e. constructed by humans, or discovered, i.e. are they eternal truths that exist regardless of whether there are humans to know them?

The design side of programming language design

Tuesday, 12 September 2017, 5:42 PM

The word design is often used when talking about programming languages. In fact, it even made it into the name of one of the most prestigious academic programming conferences. Yet, it is almost impossible to come across a paper about programming languages that uses design methods to study its subject. In this article, I want to convince you that this is a missed opportunity.

Getting started with The Gamma just got easier

Wednesday, 14 June 2017, 1:27 PM

Create open visualizations in four steps. The Gamma aims to make it easier to create transparent data visualizations that let the reader explore data further. Until today, getting started with The Gamma was tricky, because you had to provide data via a REST service. The new Gallery makes it easy to upload your own CSV file or paste data from Excel and it also guides you through the process and lets you easily embed the results into your blog. If you were curious about The Gamma, now you can start using it!

Papers we Scrutinize: How to critically read papers

Wednesday, 12 April 2017, 2:05 PM

It is very easy to see academic papers as containing eternal and unquestionable truths, rather than as something that the reader should actively interact with. I recently remarked about this saying that just reading papers is too passive. In this blog post, I try to uncover some of the caveats when reading papers - how we misread history and ignore historical context in which paper was written. I discuss different ways of reading papers and suggest a more active way of reading.

Read more blog posts...

Academic publications

I published papers about programming languages including type providers, theory of coeffects, concurrent and reactive programming, but also philosophy and history of programming. My academic page has a complete list, including teaching and other activities.

Stories of storytelling about UK’s EU funding

Mariana Marasoiu et al. Proceedings of European Data and Computational Journalism Conference, 2018

We explore the difficulties of open data analysis using the data available on EU funding to the UK. We report on some of the fundamental difficulties we observed whilst analysing this data and we suggest ways of addressing such difficulties.

You guessed it! Reflecting on preconceptions and exploring data without statistics

Pablo León-Villagrá et al. Proceedings of European Data and Computational Journalism Conference, 2018

We live in times in which information is abundant, but trust in expert analysis is low. How can we make complex issues accessible for readers and overcome their preconceptions? We propose a novel way of presenting readers with data and raising awareness for individual bias and preconceptions.

Wrattler: Reproducible, live and polyglot notebooks

Tomas Petricek, James Geddes, Charles Sutton. In Proceedings of TaPP 2018

Notebook systems such as Jupyter are a popular environment for data science, but they use an architecture that leads to a limited model of interaction and makes versioning and reproducibility difficult. Wrattler revisits the architecture and allows richer forms of interactivity, efficient evaluation and guaranteed reproducibility.

Academic page with all papers...

When the time permits, I enjoy traveling. I add one new picture each month. See 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and the first photos of 2019.

Contact & about

This site is hosted on GitHub and is generated using F# Formatting and DotLiquid. For more info, see the website source on GitHub.

Please submit issues & corrections on GitHub. Use pull requests for minor corrections only.

  • Twitter: @tomaspetricek
  • GitHub: @tpetricek
  • Email me: tomas@tomasp.net

Blog archives

November 2018 (1),  October 2018 (1),  May 2018 (1),  September 2017 (1),  June 2017 (1),  April 2017 (1),  March 2017 (2),  January 2017 (1),  October 2016 (1),  September 2016 (2),  August 2016 (1),  July 2016 (1),  May 2016 (2),  April 2016 (1),  December 2015 (2),  November 2015 (1),  September 2015 (3),  July 2015 (1),  June 2015 (1),  May 2015 (2),  April 2015 (3),  March 2015 (2),  February 2015 (1),  January 2015 (2),  December 2014 (1),  May 2014 (3),  April 2014 (2),  March 2014 (1),  January 2014 (2),  December 2013 (1),  November 2013 (1),  October 2013 (1),  September 2013 (1),  August 2013 (2),  May 2013 (1),  April 2013 (1),  March 2013 (1),  February 2013 (1),  January 2013 (1),  December 2012 (2),  October 2012 (1),  August 2012 (3),  June 2012 (2),  April 2012 (1),  March 2012 (4),  February 2012 (5),  January 2012 (2),  November 2011 (5),  August 2011 (3),  July 2011 (2),  June 2011 (2),  May 2011 (2),  March 2011 (4),  December 2010 (1),  November 2010 (6),  October 2010 (6),  September 2010 (4),  July 2010 (3),  June 2010 (2),  May 2010 (1),  February 2010 (2),  January 2010 (3),  December 2009 (3),  July 2009 (1),  June 2009 (3),  May 2009 (2),  April 2009 (1),  March 2009 (2),  February 2009 (1),  December 2008 (1),  November 2008 (5),  October 2008 (1),  September 2008 (1),  June 2008 (1),  March 2008 (3),  February 2008 (1),  December 2007 (2),  November 2007 (6),  October 2007 (1),  September 2007 (1),  August 2007 (1),  July 2007 (2),  April 2007 (2),  March 2007 (2),  February 2007 (3),  January 2007 (2),  November 2006 (1),  October 2006 (3),  August 2006 (2),  July 2006 (1),  June 2006 (3),  May 2006 (2),  April 2006 (2),  December 2005 (1),  July 2005 (4),  June 2005 (5),  May 2005 (1),  April 2005 (3),  March 2005 (3),  January 2005 (1),  December 2004 (3),  November 2004 (2), 

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