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Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language: F#
- puredemo 17y agoNot sure how stealth this is, I've been hearing about F# for years. I'm glad they are finally releasing it.
- _delirium 17y agoNot only have you been hearing about it for years; it's also been released for years: F# 1.0 came out in 2006! The only difference here is that with the release of F# 2.0, it's now shipped by the Microsoft "product" teams instead of "research" teams: it's included in Visual Studio 2010 available in boxes on shelves, whereas previously it was available for download.
- BudVVeezer 17y agoWhich is actually a pretty big deal because it means the integration into VS will be greatly improved. I've not tried the VS 2010 F#, but the plugin version was pretty clunky within the IDE.
- gaius 17y agoIt's a big deal because now you can just go ahead and use it and no manager can complain that it's not an official language. Hackers sometimes forget how conservative the mainstream IT industry can be.
- docgnome 17y agoYeah, I was pretty sure that I played with it when I was doing .NET in school... Thought I was going crazy.
- confuzatron 17y agoNope you weren't going crazy, you were just reading The Register. It's a kneejerk anti-MS site where all headlines must sufficiently glib before being accepted for publication. Blech.
- Rickasaurus 17y agoThere is a bit more to it than that. There's now a promise to no longer keep breaking binary compatibility. This part is an especially big deal.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Zak 17y ago[F#] is the first time we've seen integration of a functional programming language with an industrial-strength framework and toolset I think this requires very specific definitions of all his terms. It would be easy to argue that Lisp machines met this definition, and that's just the first example that came to mind.
- eru 17y agoYou may be right. Though the Lisp on the Lisp machines wasn't very functional, yet. Or at least `less' functional by default than F# is. I am thinking mostly of static scoping.
- DrSprout 17y agoI suspect by "industrial-strength" what he actually means is "something you have to pay a lot of money for." rather than "is widely acknowledged as a useful and powerful tool by the industry."
- tomjen3 17y agoLisp may be cheap now, but I doubt the lisp machines were cheap back in the day.
- astine 17y agoI could be wrong, but I believe that you had to pay a lot of money for Lisp Machines back in the day.
- ekiru 17y agoOr now, if for some reason you still want one. It wouldn't cost you quite as much as Visual Studio Ultimate, but it would likely cost you more than Visual Studio Professional With MSDN($1,199) and a fairly impressive modern PC.
- ashleytowers 17y ago"first time we've seen" Maybe they haven't been looking around - cough Clojure cough
- borisk 17y agoVery stable and fast implementation. Just finished porting a Scala project and the F# code runs around 50% faster on CLR 4.0 compared to Scala on JRockit JVM.
- jacquesm 17y agoDaniel B Markham wrote his Quote Feed project in F#.
- iamelgringo 17y agoAnybody using F# for web apps? Thoughts? Comparisons?
- cygwin98 17y agoI've been thinking of this for a while. Although there is fswebtools that shares the same spirit as GWT http://tomasp.net/blog/fswebtools-intro.aspx http://tomasp.net/blog/fswebtools-intro.aspx, it's not as polished. IMHO, F# for the backend to provide web service, jQuery for the frontend, and with JSON as the intermediate protocol may be a good combo.
- MichaelGG 17y agoIntellifactory makes a commercial product for exactly this: http://www.intellifactory.com/ http://www.intellifactory.com/ Write it all in F#, including using async workflows for seamless server-side calls, and have it compile down to JS.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 17y agoMicrosoft bought a lot of goodwill from me when they productionized F#. Finally, functional programming that anyone will be allowed to use! Then I found out that they want you to pay them $80 to change the desktop background in Windows 7 Starter. So now I have forgotten about F#, and recommend Haskell instead. OCaml and Scala are also fine. Fuck Microsoft, they'll never change.
- ivenkys 17y agoThis article is wrong or incorrect at so many levels , i wonder why did it even get submitted and get as high as it is.
- MichaelGG 17y agoThey did make a good point: F#'s marketing is severely limited. It seems that Microsoft doesn't want to be in the position of saying "hey, here's a language that does everything C# does, plus a ton of extra great things, and the only drawback is the tool support".
- tjmc 17y agoGood to see an Aussie programming language out there. I hear the GC runs anti-clockwise...
- mahmud 17y agoNot only, but the JIT has a habit of chucking a sickie.