Real-World Functional Programming

Chapter 13. Asynchronous and data-driven programming

This chapter covers

• Programming asynchronous workflows
• Exploring data using F# Interactive
• Defining meaning of types using units of measure
• Processing and visualizing data

We’ll begin with a quote from an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about the type of programming tasks that he’s interested in and describes the typical scenario when writing the application:

Go grab data from the web, don’t just think of it as text, bring structure into it and then [...] try out different ways of presenting it, but very interactively. [...] Write a little bit of code that may have your specific algorithm for processing that data. [Gates, 2008]

This describes exactly what we’re going to ...