Help with study of functional programmers

Are you currently developing or maintaining a medium to large-sized
program written in a functional language, such as Haskell, F#, OCaml,
or Lisp? I'm doing a study of functional programmers, as part of
a research internship at Microsoft, and I would like the opportunity to look over
your shoulder while you do debugging or coding on your project.

I'm looking for people with at least a year's experience doing
functional programming, and who are currently working on a real
project (i.e. for some purpose other than learning functional
programming). I'm only allowed to use people who can work in the US
(because of the gratuity, which is taxable income). I'd simply come
watch you work, and ask a few questions along the way. You'd do
whatever you would normally be doing. If you're near Seattle or
Portland, I'd come to your office for a couple of hours. If you're
not near Seattle or Portland, then we'd set you up with LiveMeeting
or some other remote screencast software so I can watch you from here.

Obviously security concerns are an issue - I will not share any
proprietary information that I learn about while visiting you.

In exchange for your help, Microsoft will offer you your pick of free
software off its gratuity list (which has about 50 items, including
Visual Studio Professional, Word for Mac, XBOX 360 games) or any book
from MS Press.

We're doing this because expert functional programmers have not been
studied much. We plan to share our findings through academic
publications, to help tool developers create debugging tools that are
genuinely helpful in real-world settings.

I'm hoping to finish my observations by August 8th, so please contact
me immediately if you're interested!

Thank you,

Chris Bogart
425-538-3562
t-chribo@microsoft.com

icfp contest update

Well, I got threads and tcp and everything all figured out, and my simple "spike" solution works the way I intended it: the rover makes a beeline for home base, ignoring craters, martians, and boulders, and usually dying or crashing.

However I can't get it to run in Mono on the LiveCD environment for the contest. I've been using Visual Studio on a virtual machine on my mac. Visual Studio runs a little slow, but the program runs fine. But when I try to run it in mono, I get a big wodge of error messages, none of them pertaining to my code. I used some new features of F#, so it may be that it exercises some corners of mono that haven't been tested yet.

I think at this point I'm going to give up on submitting a solution and just post interesting bits of my code here after the contest ends. I still want to think some about a quick and dirty way of avoiding craters, but I probably won't spend much more time on it: it's nice out today!

I feel like I've gotten what I wanted to out of this: building something significant in F#. I have 238 lines of code, and I used F#'s Erlang-style mailboxes, asynchronous workflow, discriminated unions, class definitions, and I overcame the headaches of separating things into multiple modules while making sure all references went backwards. I got threading and networking in a pretty clean way I think. The ugliest part of the code is actually probably the navigation code, that looks at where the rover is and how fast it's going, and decides how to head for home base.

ICFP contest day 2

I spent a few hours programming last night, and I still don't have a running program yet. F# turns out to have some pretty interesting monad-like things for handling asynchronous code (they're called "workflows") and this appears to be the right way to handle sending and receiving stuff from a TCP/IP connection.

I think I have a pretty good idea how to make this work, but I'm banging my head against the details: for example I want to asynchronously read a line of text from a socket, passing it along to the rest of my program as soon as a carriage return is received. So, do I have to read one byte at a time in a tail-recursive function, adding to a mutable string? Or is there an object or something in the library that will do this for me? There's a tradeoff between searching and searching in the docs to find the most natural way of doing it in the language you're trying to learn, versus writing it from the ground up yourself, probably less efficiently, as a newbie.

My problem may be that I need to sit down and read a book on .NET instead of thinking I can adhoccumulate expertise efficiently.

By the way, I like Expert F# better than Foundations of F#. I wish I'd read the former instead of the latter as preparation.

Wish me luck!

ICFP contest! Rovers on Mars!

The 2008 icfp contest just started! Sadly I'm at work for another several hours, but I skimmed through the description, and hopefully the programmer-lobe of my brain is already hard at work on the problem while my researcher-lobe is busy dealing with participant recruitment for a study.

This one is not all parsey like the last two years: it's all real-time execution and floating point numbers in a navigation problem. It's not the kind of thing I've thought about much, so it should be an interesting challenge. Also, my laptop plug *just* stopped working, so I may have to complete the entire task in 2 hours and 27 minutes. Hopefully they have extras in Seattle somewhere.

My plan this year is to do it in F#, since it's cool and also I'm doing a study on it for my summer internship. But they made it a little harder by not including F# in the list of supported languages. But no worries -- they do have mono (the .NET clone, not the disease), so I'll just have to upload an executable.