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Microsoft To Allow Code Contributions To F#
An anonymous reader writes "The F# programming language team has been providing source code releases for years, but all contributions to the core implementation were internal. Microsoft is now changing that. They've announced that they'll be accepting code contributions from the community for the core F# language, the compiler, library, and Visual F# tools. They praised the quality of work currently being done by the F# community: 'The F# community is already doing high-quality, cross-platform open engineering using modern tools, testing methodology and build processes. Some particularly active projects include the Visual F# Power Tools, FSharp.Data, F# Editing Support for Open Editors, the Deedle DataFrame library and a host of testing tools, web tools, templates, type providers and other tools.' Microsoft is actively solicited bug fixes, optimizations, and library improvements."
I got in trouble with Personnel for suggesting we "F# our stack".
Table-ized A.I.
When they discontinue F# in five years, you can link back to this with an "I told you so."
I always thought that # was pronounced "rap." Now I see that it should be pronounced "uck."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Evaluating the merits of a language within 5 minutes, a brief article, and personal bias... seems legit
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
If you had told me back more than a decade ago that Microsoft would be supporting a commercial version of a language based on ML, OCAML and Haskell, I'd shook my head in complete disbelief. But, here we are, and this is great news as it allows for more engagement from the Haskell and other functional programming communities.
F#, like it's other ML-based dialects, is amazing for solving certain problems in a expressive and concise manner. Of course, it's a powerful language that can leads to abuses. And, don't get me wrong, the additional constructs for full .Net interoperability complicate the language a bit compared to Haskell. But, it is still a joy to use when you can.
Frankly, if there was local F# work, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. I've even considered trying to convince a couple of local shops to give it a try for some advanced projects.
I haven't looked at it for a while, but it's basically Microsoft's version of OCaml which is an objected oriented ML variant, (and a very slick language with a long development history).
I'm not really seeing it catch on either, but OCaml's sweet spot was writing fast code that dealt with very complex data structures. It enforced static typing, but used type inference to figure out what the types of variables were. It has powerful operators for assembling and splitting up data structures that let you write very concise code that was checked at compile time for correctness.
It is somewhat similar in flavor to Haskell (although it's probably wrong to say they're going in Haskells direction.. more that they have common ancestors).
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =