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An Interview With F# Creator Don Syme

Posted by kdawson on from the same-as-g-flat-if-you're-tempered dept.

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."

4 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Checkbox marketing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    F# for Scientists ... F# in the finance industry ... F# ... statistical machine learning algorithms ... solar system simulator

    and the emotive language and buzzwords

    compelling ... impact ... convincing ... advertisement delivery machinery ... simple and intuitive

    *yawn* unconvinced.

    1. Re:Checkbox marketing by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Somebody wrote a bad program in C# that crashed and somebody else wrote a better program at another company on Java and it didn't crash. What more evidence does one need that .Net is crap?

  2. FParsec by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's one particular reason to look at F#, and that's FParsec. Parser combinators are just awesome, and don't get me wrong - I like the original Parsec, and Haskell in general! - but its IDE support is minimal, and debugging it is a pain.

    With F#, you get the same awesome tool, but in an environment where you can actually use it for day-to-day jobs - write any parsing code as an F# library using FParsec, and call it from the main body of C#/VB/IronPython code.

  3. Re:never programmed before??? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

    F# version is essentially the same as OCaml version. In practice, you will notice that there are a lot of people who prefer OCaml to Haskell even today, and that has to do with quality of implementation. Haskell is a nice language on the paper, but its laziness makes it both hard to implement fast, and insanely hard to debug.

    With F#, you get language on par with OCaml (so less high-level and expressive than Haskell). But you also get the ability to directly call any existing .NET library - no wrappers or FFI declarations needed. Furthermore, you get an IDE with syntax highlighting, code completion, error checking as you type, and debugging.

    Also, keep in mind that most people who get acquainted with F# today aren't familiar with Haskell. In fact, most of them don't even know it exists. They are C++, C# and VB users, who suddenly discover a new project type in VS2010, and are curious as to what this is all about. For them, the basis of comparison will be a typical imperative OO language, not Haskell - and most marketing materials are written with that in mind. It is generally assumed that people who know Haskell can judge these kind of things on their own :)