Inviting Epiphany - Richard Minerich

Thank you all for your comments on my previous post, I appreciate the time you all took in sharing your perspectives very much.  Many of you have brought up great analogies to demonstrate how you feel and in reading these responses I realized I must not have been very clear. There are some...

In the early days programming was considered a subdiscipline of mathematics. In fact, the very first person to write an algorithm was renowned as an mathematical genius. However, somewhere along the way we forgot. We began to think of ourselves as something different, a profession not beholden to...

For the past year I’ve been working almost entirely in F# and have found the experience to be everything I hoped it to be and better. In just six months I was able to bring a research project to fruition which has since made our company millions of dollars. F#’s terseness made...

I had a great time at NYC Code Camp this last weekend. About half the people in my talk already knew F# and were there to talk about Type Providers, the other half just came to see what this F# thing was all about. This post is to help those in the second half begin [...]

I know this post isn’t of my usual technical type, but I hope you’ll bear with me while I share an idea I’ve been thinking about. Starting way back with SETI@Home, scientists have been borrowing our computer time in exchange for awesomely nerdy screen savers for years. However,...

While writing the previous article on tokenized matching I realized I left out some important background information on Jaro-Winkler distance. First, there’s something important to know about the Jaro-Winkler distance: it’s not a metric distance and so does not obey the triangle...

Continuing from last time, let’s look at how one goes from imperative pseudocode to pure functional using Gale-Shapely as an example. Overall, to convert an algorithm from imperative to functional is a fairly simple process once you understand how to convert from a while loop to recursion...

Initially, one of the biggest problems I found when trying to marry records was the god awful quality of much of data I often have to work with. It’s mostly old mainframe and database data with truncated fields, limited character sets and fields with nonsensical contents. Even worse, much...

Last time we dove into the Jaro distance algorithm and picked apart how each of its components are calculated. However, from a modern perspective Jaro alone is a rather weak method of string matching. It was Winkler’s extension that brought this algorithm into widespread modern use. Matthew...

When first approaching the task of record linkage I was initially overwhelmed by the huge number of different algorithms available for comparing strings. Now I know that the secret to finding your way in this sea of algorithms is two fold. First, know that many are outdated and have newer and...

Just yesterday I gave a presentation on F# and the DLR for the Naval Surface Warfare Center. Many thanks to Kevin Hazzard and Chris Bowen for recommending me. It was a fantastic opportunity to speak on the benefits of F# to an entirely new audience and I learned a few things about the DLR along [...

I’ve given quite a few talks over the last couple of months and at each and every one I promised to post my content shortly afterwards here on my blog. However, due to some extreme laziness early on coupled with a crazy schedule and some unfortunate (but thankfully temporary) health...

In F# there are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the style in which you will perform a computation.  So, for our last meeting of the the NYC F# User Group I decided to try and build a general understanding of how the different styles are related to each other through trying [...]

As I mentioned in my most recent edition of F# Discoveries This Week, it’s Code Camp season and it would be great to see more F# users out there sharing the love.  To help out, I’ve provided the slides from my previous talks in one place under the Creative Commons Attribution license....

If you got runtime errors I feel bad for you son I got 99 problems but dynamic ain’t one I got the cube patrol on the code patrol Foes that wanna try and keep my source out of control Ruby writers that say he’s “Science Strict Not-Bold” I’m from university stupid...

I’ve been enviously watching Phillip Trelford publish excellent F# games all week and tonight I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  I stayed in, rolled up my sleeves and ported the very same ant colony simulation I used in my CUFP workshop to Silverlight 4.0. Wow, just look at those...

I was taking the elevator down after getting settled in my hotel room and as the doors opened I was awestruck by the sight of Don Syme sitting on a couch, typing away on his laptop. With a bit of trepidation I walked up to him and introduced myself.  It was immediately obvious that he [...]

Just under two weeks ago I was packing up my things at Atalasoft and enjoying my last Friday Beer:30 with coworkers and friends. A lot has changed in these past two weeks. I’ve moved into my Hoboken apartment and (partially) assembled a whole set of IKEA furniture, I’ve gotten started...

Everyone was ready for a nice relaxing day at the beach when they showed up for my CUFP tutorial… So, after realizing how boring it would be teach thirty flavors of factorial to experienced functional programmers for four hours, I thought I’d spice things up a bit. AI is always fun...

Nearly a month ago I visited the NYC ALT.NET User Group in Manhattan.  Having been told by Steve Bohlen that I was up against a particularly sharp audience, I decided to do something much different than I had in any of my previous talks. Spread throughout my slides were questions. Those who...