I’m a frequent speaker at F# and .NET events, author of numerous C# and F# articles and a StackOverflow addict. I have been Microsoft C# MVP since 2004 and I used F# since early Microsoft Research versions.
I’m convinced that F# and functional programming work well in practice and I do my best to help them:
I'm also partly involved in Phalanger, which is a PHP compiler for .NET. If you're interested in integrating PHP and ASP.NET contact DEVSENSE.
I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Alan Mycroft and Don Syme. I did a Master's degree at Charles University and visited Microsoft Research as an intern.
I'm interested in programming models and questions like: What is the best "language" for solving a given problem? How to encode these models in existing languages? How to help programmers avoids certain types of errors when using the model?
You can find my publications and other information about my research projects on my academic page.
I like taking photos, but updating the online gallery frequently was always a bit of a problem. That's why this page has a calendar, which shows a new picture every month (and also forces me to find and upload a new picture regularly).
You can browse through calendars for years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and the first photos of 2012.
Here are links to the most important things that I've been working on recently:
Together with Phil Trelford and SkillsMatter, I'm working on two courses that explain functional programming concepts to working .NET developers and teach advanced F# techniques, such as agent-based concurrency and working with data. You can find more information on my Real-World Functional Programming web site.
Content from first three chapters of my book, together with five new chapters on Real-World F# programming topics are on MSDN as part of F# documentation. The articles cover using ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight from F#, agent-based programming, charting and numerical computing.
I created the F# Snippets web site where you can easily share F# code. The website contains plenty of useful snippets with nice formatting and InstlliSense tool tips.
I extended monads with parallel composition, choice and aliasing to get an abstract notion of computation that can capture a wide range of useful programming models. A paper about the work appears in Haskell 2011.
The F# language was born as a combination of the pragmatic and real-world .NET platform and functional programming, which had a long tradition in academia. Many useful ideas or libraries in F# (like asynchronous workflows and first-class events) are inspored by research in functional programming (namely, the work on monads, continuations and functional reactive programming).
Exchanging the ideas between the research community and the real-world is one of the areas where F# excels. Indeed, the first applicatiosn of F# inside Microsoft (in the Machine Learning group at Cambridge) were all about this - combining research in machine learning with a language that can be easily used in practice.
However, F# and the F# users also made numerous contributions to the programming langauge research community. Influential ideas that come from F# include active patterns and the F# style of meta-programming for translating F# to JavaScript). I think there is a lot more that the academic community can learn from the F# community, so I'd like to invite you to talk about your ideas at two upcoming academic events!
What, why, when, where and how? Continue reading!
Read the complete article
Monday, April 16, 2012
In the final article of the TryJoinads series, I discuss how to implement the joinad structure for F# asynchronous workflows. The article also demonstrates the importance of aliasing for match! notation.
This article shows how to use joinads (and the match! extension) for writing parsers. Using joinads one can easily express choice and write a parser that recognizes an intersection of languages.
Last week, I gave a talk on asynchronous programming in F# at QCon London. I used the one hour slot to implement a Social Rectangle Drawing App - an application that showed the importance of asynchronous workflows on both client-side and server-side.
The match! research extension for F# can be used to program with a number of monadic computations. In this article, we look how to support it in one of the simplest monads - the maybe monad.
This article shows another application of the match! language extension for F#. This time, we look how to encode join calculus, which is an elegant abstraction for declarative concurrent programming.
Agent-based programming is a great way to write concurrent applications without the usual threading issues. In this article, we look how the "match!" research extension for F# simplifies writing agents. In particular, we can easily implement states that do not handle all incoming messages.
Hello, my name is Tomas Petricek and I'll be happy to hear from you:
The articles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. Source code samples are licensed under Apache 2.0.
I did my undergraduate and Master's degree at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Now, I'm a PhD student at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge as a member of Clare Hall.
