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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#.
A microsoft rep met with us a couple of weeks ago pushing .NET, win2k3, the whole enchilada. He mentioned they have MANY of these languages in development and are due to be released in the next year or so. They will still be pushing C# for mainstream development. The other languages will focus on niches where a modern OO language would be cumbersome.
;)
He wouldn't confirm whether they would have the X# naming convention
Our company has recently started to introduce .NET development alongside our core J2EE platform. One of the issues that has come up has been how useful the multi-language/single-platform support would be. Rather than taking a "best of breed" language for all development, the use of the right tool for the right job could potentially lead to interesting results - A mix of C#/ML/PROLOG/etc. as appropriate for the immesdiate task at hand. I don't think MS is far enough down the road yet to capitalise on the idea, but it's certainly an intriguing possibility - Even if it would lead to a maintenance nightmare :)
Map then applies whatever function we pass in to every member in the array (called a list in functional programming).
So, all you functional programmers, remember... a list is just another name for an array :-P
Seriously, though... I was discussing the future of programming languages with some friends and we agreed that a real step forward would be to provide features such as higher order functions in a mainstream language... could this be it?
If so then it's a little worrying... I'd rather not see any revolutionary languages come out of MS, if at all possible...
(Cambridge's Computer Science degree teaches ML followed by Java in the first year... would they switch to teaching just F# if it became popular?)
As one of the posters above mentioned, python's lambda is actually borrrowed from the Functional programming world. I believe it originally gets its name from Lambda Calculus, but mathematicians will have to correct me on that. (I first saw it in Scheme, the most beautiful programming language I've ever programmed in, if not the most practical.)
If you've never done functional programming, it a different animal from imperitive programming, and if you do know python, it borrows a number of things from FP, not just lambdas. Look at python's map, apply, and reduce functions, along with list comprehensions (taken from Haskell, which I really need to learn). Although, it should be noted that python's recursion really isn't optimized for FP, but you can still do quite a few things that a functional programmer would be at home with.
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