Re: Foundations of F# - Coming Very Soon

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Mark Rae wrote:
But, since we're on the (off-topic) subject of F#, do you think that's
likely to "take off" any time soon...?

Yes, but not in the way that C# did. The F# community will grow
substantially over the next year because three books are coming out on F#.
Of the three books, Robert's is probably the most suitable for C#
programmers. Mine is targetted at scientists and engineers.

Is it going to find its way into a future version of VS.NET...?

This is being discussed on the F# mailing list at the moment. Different
people want different things but the F# development team at Microsoft
Research are happy to continue F# as a research project. This means more
releases, faster development, more experimental features, better support
and so on.

Depending on your angle, this can good or it can be bad.

F# is much better than C# for scientists and engineers writing disposable
code to do analysis using a free language with all the bells and whistles
of the .NET platform. This is why we're developing tools aimed at technical
users:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_for_visualization/

For general developers, F# is harder to learn than C# (hence being branded
as a language for smart programmers) but development is much faster and
development costs are much lower. Moreover, the C# market is saturated with
tools and components but the F# market is completely empty. So anyone
selling suitable C# tools (e.g. NumericEdge) can make money by writing an
elegant F# interface and sell it.

Reason I ask is historical. Until the early betas of the first version of
VS.NET, I made my living almost exclusively with VB and its derivatives
e.g. VBA, VBScript etc, but it took me less than a day with C# to realise
that I much preferred it. However, I don't feel any more loyalty to C#
than I did to VB - if and when something better comes along, I'll drop C#
just as quickly as I dropped VB.

I think you need to examine the merits and pitfalls of adopting a language
like F# in more detail. For example, using F# turns up bugs in lots of
development tools like the ANTS profiler, which does not yet handle tail
calls.

If you want F# to pay off then you must put significant effort into learning
how and when to use functional programming.

Do you think that F# is the next "big thing..."?

I'm hoping that most developers will continue to struggle with C# because
that gives me an advantage. :-)

For anyone interested in learning the basics of F#, we have a free
introductory article on our site:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/free/introduction.html

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
The F#.NET Journal
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/?usenet
.

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