Comparing date range handling in C# and F#

I was recently working on some code for handling date ranges in Deedle. Although Deedle is written in F#, I also wrote some internal integration code in C#. After doing that, I realized that the code I wrote is actually reusable and should be a part of Deedle itself and so I went through the process of rewriting a simple function from (fairly functional) C# to F#. This is a small (and by no means representative!) example, but I think it nicely shows some of the reasons why I like F#, so I thought I'd share it.

One thing that we are adding to Deedle is a "BigDeedle" implementation of internal data structures. The idea is that you can load very big frames and series without actually loading all data into memory.

When you perform slicing on a large series and then merge some of the parts of the series (say, years 2010, 2012 and 2014), you end up with a series that combines a couple of chunks. If you then restrict the series (say, from June 2012 to June 2014), you need to restrict the ranges of the chunks:

As the diagram shows, this is just a matter of iterating over the chunks, keeping those in the range, dropping those outside of the range and restrictingthe boundaries of the other chunks. So, let's start with the C# version I wrote.

Writing custom F# LINQ query builder

One of the attendees of my virtual F# in Finance course, Stuart recently asked me a pretty advanced question about writing custom queries with F#, because he was interested in writing a nicer querying library for Amazon DynamoDB (his project is here).

The DynamoDB could even be a type generated by a type provider (with all the tables available in Dynamo DB). Now, the above example uses the built-in query builder, which is extensible, but, as far as I know, you have to use LINQ expression trees to support it. In this article, I'm going to use an alternative approach with custom builder (so you would write dynamo { ... } instead of query { ... }).

I wanted to write a minimal example showing how to do this, so this blog post is going to be mostly code (unlike my other chatty articles!), but it should give you (and Stuart :-)) some idea how to do this. I was quite intrigued by the idea of having a nice query language for DynamoDB, so I'm hoping that this blog post can help move the project forward!

Pattern matching in action using C# 6

On year ago, on this very day, I wrote about the open-sourcing of C# 6.0. Thanks to a very special information leak, I learned about this about a week before Microsoft officially announced it. However, my information were slightly incorrect - rather then releasing the much improved version of the language, Microsoft continued working on language version internally called "Small C#", which is now available as "C# 6" in the Visual Studio 2015 preview.

It is my understanding that, with this release, Microsoft is secretly testing the reaction of the developer audience to some of the amazing features that F# developers loved and used for the last 7 years and that are coming to C# very soon. To avoid shock, these are however carefuly hidden!

In this blog post, I'm going to show you pattern matching which is probably the most useful hidden C# feature and its improvements in C# 6. For reasons that elude me, pattern matching in C# 6 is called exception filters and has some unfortunate restrictions. But we can still use it to write nice functional code!

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