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."
Re:Wow ... just why? (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't looked at it for a while, but it's basically Microsoft's version of OCaml which is an objected oriented ML variant, (and a very slick language with a long development history).
I'm not really seeing it catch on either, but OCaml's sweet spot was writing fast code that dealt with very complex data structures. It enforced static typing, but used type inference to figure out what the types of variables were. It has powerful operators for assembling and splitting up data structures that let you write very concise code that was checked at compile time for correctness.
It is somewhat similar in flavor to Haskell (although it's probably wrong to say they're going in Haskells direction.. more that they have common ancestors).
Re:What happened to C#? (Score:4, Informative)
There are many CLR languages. C#, Visual Basic, "managed C++", and F#, to name a few. They all use the same "bytecode" (well, managed C++ is a weird hybrid), and can use the full .NET libraries.
F# is a functional language, so it's quite appealing to those who fap to the lambda calculus. C# is great these days for the rest of us. It finally caught up to the basic lisp functionality a few years back with LINQ (Java still hasn't), and it's nice to work in. Sure, it's odd to use "Select" and "Aggregate" instead of "map" and "reduce", but it works nicely.
Re:Wow ... just why? (Score:1, Informative)
"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.
I'm not sure why let statements would surprise you so much in a functional language, it's pretty standard construct for value binding. You also make it sound like this is something Microsoft just came out with. F# has been around since 2005.