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An Interview With F# Creator Don Syme
OCatenac passes along an interview with Don Syme, chief designer of F#, which is Microsoft Research's offering for functional programming on the .Net platform. Like Scala, which we discussed last fall, F# aims at being an optimal blend of functional and object-oriented languages. "[Q] What is the best program you've seen written in F#? [A] I've mentioned the samples from F# for Scientists, which are very compelling... For commercial impact then the uses of F# in the finance industry have been very convincing, but probably nothing beats the uses of F# to implement statistical machine learning algorithms as part of the Bing advertisement delivery machinery. ... We've recently really focused on ensuring that programming in F# is simple and intuitive. For example, I greatly enjoyed working with a high-school student who learned F#. After a few days she was accurately modifying a solar system simulator, despite the fact she'd never programmed before. You really learn a lot by watching a student at that stage."
To say a language is "functional" does not mean the same thing as the common usage of the word, which is to say "useful" or "utilitarian", though in my experience with Ocaml, Haskell, and Erlang, they are that as well if you take the time to learn to use them well. Fortran and F# have just about nothing in common.
The name "functional" is a little confusing, since imperative languages are heavily based on functions as well, though they are not typically used in the same way. For instance, in a functional language it is usually much easier to write functions that compute useful things without causing side effects, such as modification of shared state. They also usually support such features as tail call optimization (which causes certain forms of recursion to require constant rather than linear stack space), closures, the ability to declare functions within other functions, and the ability to call a function with less than its expected number of arguments, yielding a function of the remaining arguments.
Another common trait of functional languages is the absence of looping constructs, in favor of recursion and library functions like map and fold.
Oh, by the way, Fujitsu must really be into BDSM or something - they also offer COBOL for .NET.
He was probably modded as troll because, while he may be entirely correct about "marketing droids", the conclusion that "F# stinks" doesn't exactly follow from that - unless he has some specific horror stories to share. Or at least saw the language, and is qualified to judge on its merits (i.e. familiar with similar existing languages).
Looking at the wikipedia articles, I tend to think he has a point. Look at the F# version of the famous factorial program and compare to the Haskell version(s). I think anyone would be hard-pressed to prefer the F# version, but who knows?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Dr Eric Meijer from microsoft research has given a pretty nice 13 part lecture on functional programming in haskell based on graham huttons book:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Lecture-Series-Erik-Meijer-Functional-Programming-Fundamentals-Chapter-1/
there are also a ton of other videos about f# on channel9 like:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/martinesmann/Don-Syme-FSharp-and-functional-programming-in-NET/
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Dr-Don-Syme-Introduction-to-F-1-of-3/
or others specifically on asynchronicity and parallelism in f#....