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
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Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#

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.

Published: Monday, 12 November 2018, 12:58 PM
Tags: f#, functional, training, fable
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