Sam Stokes on Research in your life and studies : MSDN Academic Alliance

WTF#: Could F# have saved the Mars Climate Orbiter?

SoCal Sam — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:05:20 GMT

The Mars Climate Orbiter likely failed due to one sensor passing data in the wrong units to the central processing units on the MCO. I have created a first cut demonstrating the use of the dimensional analysis capabilities in F#. It is a simple idea, but one that helps the engineers and scientists to get the issues on incorrect dimensions being used in software.

I am working on creating a simple Hohmann trajectory simulator, but it is a little more difficult than I thought so that will be coming out a little later in my blogging cycle.

Technorati Tags: dimensional analysis,game programming,games,XNA,engineering

WTF#: Compelling demonstration

SoCal Sam — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:12:08 GMT

Email thread with my favorite manager today, we can’t agree if F# can make a compelling demo for an online talk. His criticism is correct, but I am sure I can do a compelling demo, unfortunately my favorite manager is often right, otherwise he is wrong. However, he has some experience he did a bunch of stuff with Iron Python, and I got to give him some points that he really gave it a shot. So he speaks from experience from my point of view.

I think that the burned lands demo is pretty good if I spiff it up, don’t know. Anybody got any ideas? Leave a comment. Be nice to work together on a demo that is compelling using F#. Not that I want to prove my manager wrong, I think that he would appreciate the collaboration.

Maybe something with XNA, Silverlight and then uses F# for the Physics, that would be cool. Better yet would it be possible to work with World of Warcraft? Nope, WOW uses Lua.

Any ideas?

Technorati Tags: F#,Demonstrations,Compelling

Silverlight games: Review of tutorials for Silverlight games

SoCal Sam — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:16:44 GMT

There is a fantastic tutorial out Anatomy of a Silverlight Game: Avoid Common Mistakes When Building Online Games, which is as up to date as you can find on the web. I have been going over a few of the tutorials and this is the best one I have encountered. Bill Reiss writes a good tutorial but it is somewhat out of date, and the flow breaks down a bit, but if you want to work through it, I found it useful.

For the most part the fact that Visual Web Developer 2008, the Express version of the ASP.NET tool in Visual Studio can work with Expression Blend 2 isn’t mentioned in most of these tutorials. This was a recent addition to the capabilities of the Visual Web Developer when you install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

I am reviewing the Anatomy of a Silverlight Game, and right now it is very exciting. So take a look at it, and if it is the level of training you are looking for, stick with it, if it isn’t I am working to make it more consumable for everyone else! I believe that game design should be as easy as using a Word Processor, but for now it isn’t and I don’t have time to create that level of tool.

So please stay tuned as I build up a process for more people to understand and design games! Games: The future of storytelling

Technorati Tags: XNA,XNA Express,Fun,Games,Silverlight

WTF#: Curriculum for F# part 1, thinking about curriculum for CS

SoCal Sam — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:56:46 GMT

No picture today, the Community server didn’t want to host it.

What the F#, umm, does that work? Oh well, I’ll stick with it for awhile. After all blogs like this are not broadly read, so I figure I can talk about anything I want to. Ok, on to curriculum and pedagogical discussions:

So what should a curriculum for a class that uses F# look like?
Should it be curriculum for Computer Scientists or can a new path be adopted?
If a new path is adopted then will it be accepted?
Should I care if it is accepted? (Answer: Yes)

After all, I have read most of Minsky’s papers and posts over the past 50 YEARS and he doesn’t seem to really care what other people think. Of course, he is a tenured professor and I have to think about profit and audience.

So what would be a source for representative curriculum? OCAML classes come to mind, the excellent work done at UCSD on OCAML might be a good source, but on thinking about it, why? F# and OCAML are very similar except that F# is tied to the .NET Framework and OCAML isn’t, the Light Syntax is the same.

But what about the structure of the class, if the market is to be engineers and scientist does the class have to be difficult, or should it be a fun way to re-attract the students to programming? A honeypot would be a class that is fun and informative, with an eye to the student getting a very positive experience out of the classroom.

In starting my curriculum development, I will review the “Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design[i]”. Although neither F# or OCAML was designed to be a first language, for engineers and scientists, it might very well be the only programming language this group of students will deal with in the future. The domain knowledge for engineers and scientists, not to mention the large load of “general education” in the US, means that the undergraduate engineering and science students may only have one programming classes at many schools. So in developing the curriculum the rules in the Seven Deadly Sins need to be avoided.

1. Less is More:

Much of the problem solving that students do in the real world is procedural

2. More is More:

“..syntax vs semantics, static vs dynamic structure, process vs data, puts a big cognitive load on the student….”

3. Grammatical traps:

“…confusing syntactic and semantic constructs which are present in most introductory languages…”

4. Hardware dependence:

”… novice programmer is often forced to contend simultaneously with the constraints of the underlying hardware…”

5. Backwards Compatibility: “

…languages which attempt a significant degree of historical consistency inevitably perpetuate some problematical constructs.

6. Excessive Cleverness:

“…some languages (ABC, Haskell and Python, for instance) use indentation to specify scope. This eliminates the need for grouping constructs...”

7. Violations of Expectations:

In this case the beginning programming language may do something that is not expected or uses a non-institutive rule such as always sorting lists upon input or violating semantic rules

In a future post I will review how these rules impact F#, which could be a great first programming language for non-CS, the bulk of the rest of students would clearly benefit from a functional language similar to F#.

The big question is this: How do you motivate the students who only want the programming language to solve domain problems and aren’t into the programming for programming sake?

Technorati Tags: XNA,research,curriculum,first programming language

[i] Conway, D. and McIver, L. Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design. Department of Computer Science, Monash University. <http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf>.

Conway, D. and McIver, L. Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design. Department of Computer Science, Monash University. <http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf>.

Checking out the Microsoft Speech Server

SoCal Sam — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:02:00 GMT

This blog has been moved to the following blog. Why? I decided that I want to reactivate my Software Engineering Blog and this is fitting. If you came here from DevSchool, I will make changes on that blog as well...

http://blogs.msdn.com/socal-sam/archive/2009/01/30/checking-out-the-microsoft-speech-server.aspx