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."

Comments

Re:Checkbox marketing

[Bucc5062]

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

There, fixed it for you. Why do we need to specify language when talking about about bad coding practices. From COBOL to .net I've seen my share of crash and burn applications and in almost every instance (including my own abends) it was not the "crappy" language, but the creator.