Paul Clement

Projects, Programming Languages and Procrastination…

(ooo… alliteration….)

I’m writing this blog post when I really should be doing something useful like working on my final year individual project, but hey, sometimes you just want a break and I’ve played enough Freecell recently…

So, what is my project? I’m writing a program to extract metadata (play counts, track durations etc.) from music libraries such as iTunes and Windows Media Player, display statistics and find additional information about genres, artists and albums from the Internet. That sounds simple enough, but there are a number of different data sources being used, and figuring out how to display all this data isn’t the simplest of problems…

To do all of this, I’m using F#, a functional language that runs on the .NET Framework (part of my project is evaluating how good F# is at being used for this kind of program). I’m liking the language a lot, it’s got all the benefits of being functional as well as all the benefits of running on .NET. If you want to map a function over a list of tuples, that’s fine… if you want to create a GUI using WinForms or WPF, you can… if you want to interact with other programs over COM, that’s still ok… it’s just a shame that using non-F# libraries can’t really be done in a functional style, but that’s far from being the end of the world. As good as functional code is, sometimes it’s just helpful to be using object-oriented code instead.

Visual Studio’s support for F# isn’t as good as that for C#, but it’s sufficient for most of my needs, and it’s certainly far better support than anything had for last year’s group project (but that’s one of the issues with using a new language… no IDE support whatsoever!).

Anyway, that’s probably enough for now… I’ll probably blog about my project again (nearer to completion), but that’s what I’m spending most of my time on at the moment… particularly as lectures are taking up a reasonably small amount of my time this term.