If I had known that the world was going to take note of my musings on the merits of F# versus Scala quite so quickly I probably would have spent a bit more time trying to make it meatier and more profound. Mostly I just had a few minutes to kill before lunch :-)  I suppose after I've had more of a chance to play with F# I should write up a more detailed comparison to make sure my current instincts are correct.

While I think Scala has much potential, I've been thinking the past few days that perhaps I might be happier with F#.  There are some features that are unique to each, for example, I don't believe that F# has anything like Scala's implicit arguments yet.  However, I'm still having a little trouble wrapping my head around the best way to structure some things in Scala.  Additionally, writing Scala code somehow feels rather verbose, much like programming in Java.  I'd probably be able to do both things better with some practice (converge on a design and write more concise code).  Whereas with F# I feel much more confident that I could just sit down and get code written.  And I think I'd be happier getting code done rather than using a slightly whizzier language.

So I've installed F# and will probably start doing a little hacking once I'm satisfied with my presentations.

Lately, I've been spending most of my time working on my thesis proposal presentation (Mark II) and my presentation for "Good Advice for Type-directed Programming".  Currently, I think I am going to do all of my revised proposal presentation in Omnigraffle.  I had a vague epiphany a week or two ago about how to explain most of my research with pictures rather than words.  We'll see if that works any better.  I am going to try to reuse some of my diagrams for the "Good Advice" talk, but may need to integrate that with some LaTeX as that might be a better way to typeset some of the code that will need to go in the tail end of the talk.

It's hard to believe I'll be leaving for ICFP in about a week.

The other day it occurred to me that I really kind of miss the command-line interactions older versions of AutoCAD (though I imagine current versions probably have it somewhere). At least it was nice to be able to give it exactly lengths, angles, and positions (relative or absolute) so that you could be sure you didn't accidentally eyeball something incorrectly.

I was noticing that OmniGraffle gives you the option to specify the geometry of elements via an inspector window, but somehow it didn't quite give the same feel. I'll have to load up Illustrator when I get home and check whether there options for exact geometry that I just haven't founded or noticed.