Howard Mansell - F# Type Providers and the R Programming Language

F# 3.0 introduces an exciting and innovative new programming language feature - Type Providers. This functionality allows types that are dynamically generated during development to be used in statically typed code, bringing many of the benefits of dynamic languages to statically typed languages, without sacrificing the safety of static typing.

At BlueMountain, Howard has built and open-sourced a type provider that allows the functionality of the open-source R statistical package to be used from F# in a very fluid manner. The brings the broadest suite of statistical functionality available on any platform to F#. Howard will introduce type providers and their (hitherto unexplored) uses for cross-language meta-programming. He will also discuss some of the difficulties of bridging the strong static typing of F# with the loose dynamic typing of R.

More About Howard:

Howard Mansell has a long history of applying Functional Programming in a commercial context. He currently works for BlueMountain Capital Management, where he is building an Exploratory Data Analysis platform based on F#. Prior to this, he worked in the Core Strategies group at Goldman Sachs, where he built a WPF-based GUI framework and developed GUI tools for sales people. His most notable achievement was building an F#-based infrastructure for the Quantitative Strategies group at Credit Suisse, where he was CTO of the group. It is now in use by over a hundred CS Strategists as their primary platform. He also has experience using Haskell and building proprietary functional languages at Credit Suisse.