Tech Mesh London 2012
Tomas Petricek, TweetAuthor of "Real-World Functional Programming"

Biography: Tomas Petricek
Tomas is a C# MVP, long-time F# enthusiast and author of a book Real-World Functional Programming (http://manning.com/petricek) which explains functional programming concepts using C# 3.0 teaching F# alongside. He writes a programming blog (http://tomasp.net/blog) and is an active member of the F#unctional Londoners group. He contributed to the development of F# during two internships at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Before starting PhD at Cambridge, he studied in Prague and worked as an independent .NET consultant and trainer.Presentation: TweetHow F# Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Data
The world of data speaks a different language than the world of programming languages. It uses REST, SQL database schema, XML, JSON while programming languages only understand types and classes. This causes big confusion when we try to access data from programming languages, especially from those with (otherwise very useful) static type systems.
How can a programming language learn to understand data? In this talk, I'll show how this is done using type providers in F# 3.0. You'll see how integrating data into the programming language opens the possibilities for creating exciting applications.
Talk objectives:
Explain the mismatch between data and programming languages and show how this can be solved by an extensibility mechanism like F# type providers.
Target audience:
Anyone who writes software that works with data including programmers, architects, analysts and data scientists.