Microsoft To Allow Code Contributions To F# 100
An anonymous reader writes "The F# programming language team has been providing source code releases for years, but all contributions to the core implementation were internal. Microsoft is now changing that. They've announced that they'll be accepting code contributions from the community for the core F# language, the compiler, library, and Visual F# tools. They praised the quality of work currently being done by the F# community: 'The F# community is already doing high-quality, cross-platform open engineering using modern tools, testing methodology and build processes. Some particularly active projects include the Visual F# Power Tools, FSharp.Data, F# Editing Support for Open Editors, the Deedle DataFrame library and a host of testing tools, web tools, templates, type providers and other tools.' Microsoft is actively solicited bug fixes, optimizations, and library improvements."
Wow ... just why? (Score:4, Interesting)
"let" statements -- really?
And the selling feature is list comprehension? Looks like they are trying to go into Haskells direction.
Testimonials say it's better than C# for data analysis?
Well, that train has left the station, with R, Python (and Julia) being available. This can not be won by languages, but with high-quality statistics / visualisation / machine learning libraries.
License is Apache v2 by the way.
Re:Please do our work for free! (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft is closed source. Slashdot hates.
Microsoft goes open source. Slashdot hates.
Re:Weird (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has a new boss. I'm not taking this as a sign of the new direction yet, but we should expect MS to change. Ballmer was all about the status quo (and the chair-lobbing, and the monkey dance). No reason to expect the new guy to be the same.
Great news for (some) programming language fans (Score:5, Interesting)
If you had told me back more than a decade ago that Microsoft would be supporting a commercial version of a language based on ML, OCAML and Haskell, I'd shook my head in complete disbelief. But, here we are, and this is great news as it allows for more engagement from the Haskell and other functional programming communities.
F#, like it's other ML-based dialects, is amazing for solving certain problems in a expressive and concise manner. Of course, it's a powerful language that can leads to abuses. And, don't get me wrong, the additional constructs for full .Net interoperability complicate the language a bit compared to Haskell. But, it is still a joy to use when you can.
Frankly, if there was local F# work, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. I've even considered trying to convince a couple of local shops to give it a try for some advanced projects.
Re:Weird (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's just say I'm hopeful, but skeptical. What I want is to use VS and C# to make cross-platform .NET apps (PC, android, iThingy) in an officially-supported way. You can do that with third-party commercial products today, and that's neat, but for MS to step up and back projects like Mono with patent indemnification and other official "it's not ours, but we fully support it" blessing would be a new world, and a happy one.
Re:What happened to C#? (Score:4, Interesting)
Managed C++ is absolutely wonderful for one narrow purpose: to marshal between the managed and unmanaged worlds. The .NET marshaller blows goats, but writing your own shim to transfer between .NET and STL classes is easy, runs quite fast, and (unlike the marshaller), can actually be debugged.
I can't imagine using managed C++ for anything else though. Eesh.