Hello, my name is Tomas Petricek

I'm a lecturer at University of Kent and a partner at fsharpWorks. I believe that the most fundamental work is not the one solving hard problems, but the one that offers new ways of thinking.

I follow this belief in my academic research on programming systems and history & philosophy of computing, but also in my writing on functional programming and in my F# trainings and consulting.

Before joining Kent, I did a PhD on context-aware computations at University of Cambridge, worked on F# tools in Microsoft Research and built novel tools for data exploration at The Alan Turing Institute.

Reconstructing Commodore 64 BASIC

I reconstruct the programming experience of a past system to learn what we've lost in modern programming environments. And write a simple Breakout game you can play!

Histogram programming environment

What if we represented programs as lists of interactions with programming environment, rather than as the final source code? Find out in this experimental data exploration environment!

Data exploration for non-programmers

Simple tools for data exploration that result in open and trans­parent data analyses. Also check out sample data analyses that we built at The Alan Turing Institute!

Composable data visualizations

Compost.js lets you compose rich interactive data visualizations from a small number of basic primitives. It is implemented in F# using Fable, but usable from plain JavaScript.

Context-aware programming languages

An interactive introduction to my PhD work on coeffects, a programming language abstraction for understanding how programs access the environment in which they run.

F# consulting and training

At fsharpWorks, we offer a complete range of services including training, F# consulting, and full project development. Check out our F# materials, including my F# book and talks.

Mostly longer articles that may eventually become something bigger covering my research, F#, history and philosophy and more. See the blog archive for a complete list.

Software designers, not engineers: An interview from alternative universe
Monday, 19 April 2021

Is deep learning a new kind of programming? Operationalistic look at programming
Wednesday, 7 October 2020

Creating interactive You Draw bar chart with Compost
Thursday, 16 July 2020

Data exploration calculus: Capturing the essence of exploratory data scripting
Tuesday, 21 April 2020

On architecture, urban planning and software construction
Tuesday, 7 April 2020

What to teach as the first programming language and why
Monday, 2 December 2019

What should a Software Engineering course look like?
Friday, 8 February 2019

Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#
Monday, 12 November 2018

Programming as interaction: A new perspective for programming language research
Monday, 8 October 2018

Would aliens understand lambda calculus?
Tuesday, 22 May 2018

The design side of programming language design
Tuesday, 12 September 2017

Getting started with The Gamma just got easier
Wednesday, 14 June 2017

Papers we Scrutinize: How to critically read papers
Wednesday, 12 April 2017

The mythology of programming language ideas
Tuesday, 7 March 2017

Towards open and transparent data-driven storytelling: Notes from my Alan Turing Institute talk
Thursday, 2 March 2017

I work on functional programming, data science and philosophy of computing. This list includes one or two top papers for each category. My publications page gives a complete list.

Foundations of a live data exploration environment
The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, 2020

What we talk about when we talk about monads
The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, 2018

Data exploration through dot-driven development
In proceedings of ECOOP 2017.

Miscomputation in software: Learning to live with errors
The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, 2017

Types from data: Making structured data first-class citizens in F# In Proceedings of PLDI 2016

Coeffects: A calculus of context-dependent computation
In Proceedings of ICFP 2014

Various academic texts that have not been published yet. If you have any feedback on these, please let me know!

The Gamma: Data Exploration through Iterative Prompting
Friday, 29 May 2020

Cultures of programming: Understanding the history of programming through controversies and technical artifacts
Tuesday, 2 April 2019

I enjoy traveling and add one new picture each month. See 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and the first photos of 2021.