Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of the functional language F#.
He says Haskell (and Python) has been a huge influence on the development of F#. The F# lightweight syntax was also inspired by Haskell and Python. He also says there have been some mistakes along the way. “Some experimental features have been removed as we’re bringing F# up to product quality, and we’ve also made important cleanups to the language and library. These changes have been very welcomed by the F# community.”
F# has been one of the languages I keep meaning to learn more of and do more with, yet haven’t done (much) with yet.
And I’ll be darned if Don Syme isn’t the spitting image of Shaggy.
it connects directly to .NET. Lack of GUI support is a notorious weakness of functional languages. F# may be the first to be usable as part of a large GUI program without a slow, kludgy C interface to connect it.
Not so exciting:
– it’s based on OCaml, admittedly the best of the “practical” FL’s but whose syntax is so mindslammingly ugly and convoluted that I don’t enjoy writing it. F# seems to have at least tried to help with that.
– It’s (realistically) Windows-only.
Another interesting functional language is Scala, which runs on the JVM. It is no problem to use Java classes from Scala, thus you can use Swing to write GUIs. There is also a good book about Scala: Programming in Scala.
I looked at both Scala and F# (but I did not code anything with them yet) and I think Scala is a bit nicer then F#.
Because it runs on the JVM it is also cross-platform.
Clojure is another example. Based on LISP with Swing support because it runs in the JVM.
I don’t know about your final statement Paul. My only development experience with F# has been via Mono under Linux, and I’ve had great success.
Best regards,
Steve
Why not use a mature language like Haskell instead? Why lock in? Microsoft’s market share is declining. I prefer future proof solutions.
I despise Microsoft, but using ‘marketshare’ as an argument against Microsoft is so wrong that it’s quite funny.
I don’t like Haskell: it’s a language for computer science researchers not developpers, Scala seems interesting though but I’m not sure it has a niche big enough to strive.
No its not a funny argument. What I said, was this: the market share is declining. The trend is downwards. The slope is negative. That is a bad sign.