Foundations of F# - Coming Very Soon

congrats and all the best for your book.  Do you have the contents page somewhere online and any online sample chapters??

thanks

Sounds interesting,  going to sound a silly question, but how does F# compare to something like Ruby/Python and dynamic languages?

ben2004uk wrote:



Sounds interesting,  going to sound a silly question, but how does F# compare to something like Ruby/Python and dynamic languages?

F# is in the ML family.
http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx

Anybody knows what its Magic Power^(TM) is?

I suspect there is λ, lisp-like call/cc too? Anything else?

   Cool stuff, recently I am pondering on which programming language I should learn next? C++, Ruby, Python comes into my mind immediately, but F#is just so cool so unique, I think I should pick it up eventually if I got more spare time:D

If I may suggest - C++ for wider horizon and then Lisp for functional way of viewing on problems.

I've just update the table of contents that is available on the F# wiki:

http://www.strangelights.com/fsharp/wiki/default.aspx/FSharpWiki/FoundationsOfFSharp.html

F# is similar to languages like python and ruby, in that the syntax is nice and pithy and it can be executed interactively. With the F# visual studio integration you can highlight a chunk of code and then execute it, making development feel a bit more like writing SQL. This is nice when developing winforms or wfp, as you can execute a piece of code dynamically and immediately see its effect on the window. But then you take take that same code and with little or no effort compile it into an executable or library. It's also possible to right click on an F# script and execute it, which is great for little snippets which aren't worth turning into binaries.

F# too is very much a functional programming language so by learning it you will also be learning good functional style and get the functional view on problems, and unlike lisp you all get access to any library or tool available on the .NET platform, which is very useful!

F# is a ML based language ? Thats cool. It just remember me to my second semester on the university. We had to implement a game strategy for the "4 wins" game. At the end was a contest of all implementation against each other. It was my first contact with functional programming and I can say you: sleepless nights and tons of coffee.
Maybe it's time for new implementation in F#

Yes, F# is very much an ML dialect, it shares enough of a common core of syntax with the popular ml dialect OCaml (http://caml.inria.fr/) that it's possible to cross compile programs between the two. However I don't tend to encourage that sort of apporach, unless you really need to support both platforms, as you limit your self to a sub set of both languages. The two are fairly different now, there's quite a lot that F# has that ocaml doesn't and of course there are some features that exist in ocaml that are not in F#.

Anyway it should be pretty easy to port any program from an ML style programming language to F#. Not sure I know the "4 wins" game, is it like "Connect Four"? I'd would love to see an implementation in F#. You could probably do a great GUI in WPF.

robert wrote:

 Not sure I know the "4 wins" game, is it like "Connect Four"? I'd would love to see an implementation in F#. You could probably do a great GUI in WPF.

I'm just translated the name from german, where it is called "4 gewinnt". Maybe in english the name "Connect four" is more familiar.

Of course, WPF is another topic where I'm currently read a book. So maybe "Petzold" + "Pickering" = "Connect Four" or better:
let ConnectFour = Petzolf + Pickering

littleguru wrote:


...
I find it interesting how functional languages start to become main stream. I loved them since I really wrote the first line in Haskell. It's so much fun!

I wonder if logicoriented languages will also become main stream once... they are also fun. Prolog for example.

I think it's a good move to have the power of a framework like .Net and a set of domain specific languages together. In the past it was hard to combine elegant implementations in functional or logical language together with rich UI's and/or database interaction.
F# is a step in the right direction. So you can choose the right language for specific problems. MS-Research we need P# next.

For a foundations book, it covers loads

Been added to my wishlist....might get it at the end of the summer. Going to learn C++ and Ruby first I think.  Get a good understanding of those two languages before breaking into another complete unknown....Plus I already have them books.

But it sounds very cool.

thanks for the chapter update. Looks promising, but I always prefer reading a couple of chapters at the local chapters store before ordering it So I will wait till it is released. Hopefully should keep me busy this winter