iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

@acollierastro.bsky.social YT channel is great. I just now wanted to comment on her great 'physicists don't know how planes work' video, but it has subscription only comments. So I came here to say that I loved her comparison of Lord Kelvin with today's tech bros - so true. youtu.be/F6V1qRkM_Lg

youtu.be

'physicists don't know how planes work'

YouTube video by Angela Collier

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Generalizations tend to be evil - F# was branded as being Functional first for an imposed finance/math ghetto, but never used by MS for building UX for one of their own apps - F# excels at driving UX APIs, just like any other programming task. dotnet was a ghetto - e.g. directX API was withdrawn.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

splendid article; the beauty of your illustrative images reminded me of the impact Peter Henderson's 1982 ACM article on Functional Geometry had on me in the 80s. In these evil techbro times, it is so refreshing to see a human connection from tech to arts and crafts.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Excellent video from Cory Doctorow which I contrived to miss when it came out. Full of depressing facts, but with some ideas of how EU governments can fight back: youtu.be/_Ai-fC-2Bpo

youtu.be

Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It

YouTube video by CloudFest

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Sounds like a good idea! Try the email you have for me, I've had it a long time now.....

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Cheers Keith! Much as I love #fsharp, I also enjoy this new wave of using C well; File Pilot is wonderful example of how badly the tech giants' enshitified software is bloated in comparison. In these agentic MCP/LLM times, I hope sanity hasn't arrived too late. Is AI any good for legacy systems?

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

I guess the Tech Bros are going to be our new dealers. Steve Yegge is paying about $100 a day for his habit, according to his Pragmatic Engineer interview: youtu.be/TZE33qMYwsc?...

youtu.be

Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge

YouTube video by The Pragmatic Engineer

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

I wonder if my love of using #fsharp is going to mutate into a hobby like making hardwood furniture for the joy of the craft. Or maybe LLMs will get good at writing F# in my style, and I can choose to review their code in it.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

@cmuratori.bsky.social‬ gives a compelling analysis of OOP. I wrote production code from the late 80s, using C, which was perfect timing, since OOP has only ever been a thought experiment to me. I like ADTs and DUs, and my new C is #fsharp, which does ADTs better than C. youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

youtu.be

Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

YouTube video by Better Software Conference

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

@FLCartographer at the other place, is making the music I love to listen to during my day, especially while writing #fsharp software. dinrecords.bandcamp.com/album/resple...

dinrecords.bandcamp.com

Resplendent In The Light Of The Universe (DiN93), by Field Lines Cartographer

8 track album

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Just finished watching a great interview with the maker of File Pilot. It has an excellent overview of how and why he writes software, and cites the influence of @cmuratori.bsky.social on his choices: youtu.be/pS2oLNR1PO8

youtu.be

File Pilot: Design Meets Performance | Vjekoslav Krajačić

YouTube video by Wookash Podcast

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Movie you've watched more than six times using gifs

Mayor of Amity doing his job well (according to Boris Johnson).

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Imp-77", Edinburgh ML", Prolog", Pascal", Occam", Ada", C*, Miranda/Haskell", C++", C#", F#" my production code was written in the 80s/90s in C, in what I would, with hindsight, describe as an abstract data type imperative style. #fsharp makes that much easier than C, while offering so much more.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Wonderful! Does tldraw currently have 1 to many arrows? I couldn't find that, doh!

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

There is so much to like about gleam! Two things put me off gleam: I love using camelCase. They won't let me. A major feature of F#, which has been shown to encourage better code bases, is the lack of forward references. Not having forward references can be a pain until you reap its benefits.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

not a bad bookshelf to find yourself on. Just a few books away from Benjamin C. Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" (System F implemented in OCaml anyone?), and Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before". Cool!

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

The #fsharp world mostly uses the term workflow rather than monad, so I was tickled by Scott's choice; only FP students know what a monad is. I asked GPT about the monad vs workflow wars in F#, and it explained it all: seq {} is closer to an applicative functor than a monad because it lacks bind

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

@tldraw.com continue to impress me with their choices in shape and interconnect layout. I first noticed them last year via their harnessing of LLMs to help with diagram content choices, but the quality of their pixel placement is the thing that gives me most joy.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I should have tagged my post about Scott's talk with #fsharp, since I forgot to mention that it is a brilliant example of the application of F#, as well as a great explanation of more general design ideas.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Superb talk by Scott, I was surprised by how much was new to me, like him combining different monads. Ending with a tie in to HATEOAS was an unexpected delight; I only discovered HTMX just a few months back.....

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Hamilton consistently makes interesting videos, and flies the flag for using #fsharp. Unfortunately I have to agree with him on his given tier, which has absolutely nothing to do with its excellence as a general purpose programming language, and everything to do with Microsoft's lack of vision.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

ps. I hate that Microsoft never properly supported 3D APIs for dotnet. Some #fsharp early demos did great stuff with 3D because there were working and easy to use dotnet DLLs for that technology. Microsoft's 3D technology needed dotnet DLL bindings. For C# folks too.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

by humans I mean everyone except those specific developers implementing an automatic file import or export for a computer program.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

I would say: #fsharp is the best general purpose programming language. Microsoft tragically uses it only as a lipstick source for its Java clone. Humans should not have been shown XML, never mind asked to actually write stuff in it. WPF's primary API should have been a regular dotnet DLL.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Excellent video by Nic Barker on UI layout. I am looking forward to trying out some ideas from his very clearly explained development approach and experience in my own #fsharp GUI projects (e.g. I have a pet tree layout control).

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I worry about you missing stuff from use of the word "us". First paper I thought of checking is by Dijkstra, not that he, sadly, will be posting on Bluesky

Quote from Dijkstra's "Go To Considered Harmful" paper using the word "us".

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

To paraphrase from Jerry Maguire, Tarau had me at "Kolmogorov-Chaitin algorithmic complexity". More seriously, as I have no idea what that means, your code in iso.fsx is a pleasure to read, and such a great advert for #fsharp expressiveness.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

||> makes that easier, and it is very much worth learning how to fold. My remark was more a reflection on when to use it once it is a tool you have available. I see #fsharp as the best widely available general purpose programming language which can do "functional programming" when that is needed.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

||> certainly makes writing folds easier to read. My problem is that I find that "older" me no longer understands "clever" folds I wrote a month ago, so though I am pleased I learned how to do folding, I usually employ mutable variables in a very local context rather than faffing about with folds.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Pipelining is key to the magical concise expressiveness of #fsharp, and Don's choice of |> for the op syntax is superb, especially in a ligature supporting font like Fira. As a contrarian, I am also a huge fan of ◁ for avoiding long ( ) runs. In other news, here is the hat I recently had made:

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Your quip is much funnier to me having just read Richard Gabriel's "The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution" because of your stimulating Adventure Calculus post. I have long been troubled by how much of life is a game. It's enough to drive you to Camus' Absurdism, which I did last week.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

On a related thought, this wonderous evocation of 70s East Germany, through the medium of electronic music, is definitely worth checking out (I think the later albums just keep getting better): kosmischerlaufer.bandcamp.com/album/volume...

kosmischerlaufer.bandcamp.com

Volume One, by Kosmischer Läufer

5 track album

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Popul Vuh's soundtracks for the filums of Werner Herzog have many sublime moments. On their best of album, the track Brüder des Schattens - Söhne des Licht from Nostferatu gets me every time with its brooding male choir and gradual ramp-up of dissonance. thedeadpixels.squarespace.com/articles/the...

thedeadpixels.squarespace.com

The Best of Popol Vuh for Werner Herzog- Retro Soundtrack Review

There are many prog rock groups who are fondly remembered but one that I think are underappreciated or overlooked are Popol Vuh . Popol Vuh soundtracked many of Werner Herzog ’s movies and formed ...

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Congratulations! I've been using FuncUI on several personal projects for over a year now, and really enjoy its Component model's flexibility and readability. Also great to see #Avalonia doing really well too. Hopefully even more folk will leave behind C# and XAML for the joy of F# with FuncUI.

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Thanks for alerting me to Datastar, my re-interest in the web was rekindled earlier this year by HTMX; Datastar looks like possibly an even better approach. I'm an hour into this great interview with Delaney and hooked: youtu.be/HbTFlUqELVc

youtu.be

Hypermedia at 144fps!?

YouTube video by hypermedia-tv

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

By "easy to do", I should also have included "or even know about".

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dr g @mccaskill.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

I loved this video when it first appeared. It doesn't get old, because the reasons behind the surface simplicity of F# are quite complicated and hard earned, which this explains. We probably wouldn't have had so many lame new languages since Edinburgh ML, if type inference (etc.) were easy to do.

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