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Inside Microsoft's New F# Language
robyn217 writes "There's a new language being formed in the bowels of Microsoft. Recently I got word that the language F# (pronounced F Sharp) is nearing workable stages at Microsoft Research. So, I went in for a look-see. What I found was an interesting blend of imperative (Java, C#) and functional languages(it's ML-based, too!). It looks pretty enticing to me from a computer science perspective, but I'm not sure it would fly in the professional market. I can see the ease of development that a language loosely based on ML would bring, but I can't see coders switching over in droves since it's a tough learning curve." Our previous story on F#.
F# will be learned by people when managers and not university lecturers decide that it is something that coders need to learn or even when coders decide it's necessary for something.
Stop thinking that the world is out to make you use MS products no matter what. The businesses that do the employment and the people who should be advising them (cough -you- cough) are the people who make those decisions.
Anyone learning Computer Science should in no way be gearing themselves with any particular product
Any university offering courses in computer science is doing students a dis-service if it sends them out of the institution without an MS-centric, Linux-centric or any other square peg solution to fit any hole they come across.
I always thought the aim of education and particularly any discipline that considers itself a science was to teach skills and thinking which could be applied across the field so the graduates would find themselves able to adapt to any language or equipment that they found it necessary to use.
Which only goes to show how much cleaner mapping functions to lists is.
map (fun x -> x*x) list
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Open Source Sysadmin
One way to overcome that inertia is to provide bindings for your niche language against a major runtime - like compiling it to Java bytecode, or, in this case, IL.
Now, .NET has it's own inertia to overcome, but because it's Microsofts baby, it has alot of advantages that the language/runtime that Joe Programmer makes doesn't have.
This is interesting for a couple other reasons - it's been reported before that it should be easy to port functional languages to .NET - and that it's apparently hard to have them compile to Java (I don't know crap about functional languages, I'm just parroting here), so here's the proof of that. Also, like it or not, .NET is very big and is being very heavily pushed by the single most influential company in IT - and if you're a fan of functional languages, I don't see how this is a loss for you or why you're bitter about it.