Luke Hoban: Latest version of F# Released - What's the story? What's next?

Posted By: Charles | May 20th @ 3:24 PM | 36,226 Views | 19 Comments
With the release of VS 2010 Beta 1 today, F# is officially a part of the in-box VS family in the sense that it ships with VS 2010 as a first class language for use in building your .NET projects that require the power and flexibility of the functional approach to program composition. For VS 2008, a great IDE and toolset that you have at your disposal today, you can install the equivalent version of F# that ships with VS2010 Beta 1 as an add-in install. Right on!

Here, F# Program Manager Luke Hoban talks with me about F#, generally and what people have been doing with it, the current state of the technology, what F# enables, etc. You'll even see some code Luke's written, but this is mainly an Old School Channel 9 conversation. You know the drill.

Enjoy.

Learn more:

Don Syme's announcement of the F# 2010 beta release: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-beta1-with-f-is-now-available-plus-matching-f-ctp-update-for-vs2008.aspx

The F# Dev Center: http://fsharp.net/
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#May 20th @ 3:43 PM
JoshRoss
JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

Congratulations on the release of Beta 1!  I have a question about Edit and Continue with F#, will it be supported with 2010?  If so, what are the tricky parts of getting it working, specificly working around immutability.

And what happened to your blog?

#May 21st @ 5:05 AM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

can f# functions be made available as c#/vb extension methods? that one feature would increase the usefulness of f# for the avarage .net programmer like ten times Smiley

@35:00

that c# code could have been made a lot more compact with a linq statement Smiley when written in linq the f# and c# versions wouldnt look all that diffrent imo Smiley

#May 21st @ 11:43 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

But why would you do that when you can do it more naturally in F#? There are many things that you can do in C# that you can do in F#. In fact, Luke showed this over and over again when he was  C# program manager. This is part of why he was the natural choice to PM F#... I'd argue that you should use the right tool for the job at hand. If you simply want to use the power of monadic query comprehensions in C# (exposed as LINQ syntax), then use LINQ in your C# or VB.NET. If you want to program in a functional style and use less syntax to get the job done, then F# is the natural choice. The fact that F# is a .NET language means you can use it for constructing algorithms that it lends a very helping hand for at composition time and then use any number of other .NET languages that are better suited for other compositional tasks.

C

#May 21st @ 12:28 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

well, that perticular part of code may be more convenient to write in f# but if your whole project is a c# project, the convenience of a single method might not be worth it compared to the effort of creating and integrating a new project right? Smiley it all depends how much code like that you have..

but thats not my point, my point was that this perticular c# code is not representative of what c# is capable of, i argue that a c# linq query is not hugely diffrent from the f# example shown. there are plenty of other examples where f# really do provide a compact bit of code that really isnt possible to write in c# (pattern matching for example), im just saying a scenario like that would make for a better example of the f# coolness Smiley

beeing able to write f# extension methods usable from c# would be a really great enabler for doing just what your saying, using the right tool for the write job. surely you dont disagree with at part of my post? Smiley

#May 21st @ 12:51 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

I'm not disagreeing. I'm simply asking questions. Smiley

#May 21st @ 1:10 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

hehe ok Smiley

i guess my awnser is that if most of my code is most easily written in c# but f# is more suitable for some parts, id make a c# project and pay the inconvecience of either integrating two projects or writing it all in c# Smiley

but if i can write the f# suitable parts in f# and expose them as extension methods, i dont have to choose at all Big Smile

#May 21st @ 1:22 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

What's wrong with writing a shared library for, say, computation-heavy tasks, in F# and then using it in a C# (or VB.NET or whatever.NET) project?

C

#May 21st @ 1:41 PM
Laurens
Laurens

I totally agree Smiley

I currently try to make usefull F# examples for the company that I currently work for. I use C# for creating stuff like front-ends, main architecture, etc. And I build shared F# libraries to perform the actual computations/data processing in such a way that it easily plugs into the main architecture... (thanks to the excellent support for OO design and .NET in F# Smiley )

I love F# because it allows me to focus on the complex problem that I want to solve, without being distracted by all the plumbing code in the background.

p.s.: Thanks to all the people at C9 for all the excellent F# video's!

#May 21st @ 2:34 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw

nothing, i havent said that there is Smiley im just saying its a trade of with how much code we're talking about and how genericly applicable it is.. i mean you woudnt create a library just to be able to write one single specific method that is only used in one place in f#, espscially not if the penalty is of writing it in c# is so small. (comparing a c# linq statement with the equvalent f#). a generic library is another story Smiley

and again, beeing able to create extension methods in f# doesnt contradict what you're saying at all, it further enables it Smiley [im still not clear on if thats possible or not]

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