Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language: F# | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language: F#

theregister.co.uk

85 pointsmwexler31 comments

[F#] is the first time we've seen integration of a functional programming language with an industrial-strength framework and toolset

I think this requires very specific definitions of all his terms. It would be easy to argue that Lisp machines met this definition, and that's just the first example that came to mind.

You may be right.

Though the Lisp on the Lisp machines wasn't very functional, yet. Or at least `less' functional by default than F# is. I am thinking mostly of static scoping.

I suspect by "industrial-strength" what he actually means is "something you have to pay a lot of money for." rather than "is widely acknowledged as a useful and powerful tool by the industry."

Lisp may be cheap now, but I doubt the lisp machines were cheap back in the day.

I could be wrong, but I believe that you had to pay a lot of money for Lisp Machines back in the day.

Or now, if for some reason you still want one. It wouldn't cost you quite as much as Visual Studio Ultimate, but it would likely cost you more than Visual Studio Professional With MSDN($1,199) and a fairly impressive modern PC.

"first time we've seen"

Maybe they haven't been looking around - cough Clojure cough

Parent mentioned Lisp Machines. They had a full IDE (well before the acronym) based on a functional language.

They predate F# by a couple decades.

Well, really multi-paradigm. Using it functionally was certainly an option, but there was also progn, loop, etc. the imperative types.

F#, like OCaml, is also multi-paradigm. Maybe not as much as Common Lisp, but it does have language-level support for OOP and imperative programming. It's not a purely functional language like Haskell.

F# appears to have been started in 2002. Scala was in 2003 and Clojure around 2005 with the first public release in... 2007? This announcement isn't about the release of F#, but its productization.

> functional programming language with an industrial-strength framework and toolset

For some values of "functional programming language" and "industrial-strength framework and toolset"

Erlang?

The Lisp Machine was not 'integrated with an industrial-strength framework and toolset' like F# is integrated into .net and Visual Studio.

The Lisp Machine was the opposite of that. The frameworks and the toolsets were integrated INTO the Lisp Machine.

Not sure how stealth this is, I've been hearing about F# for years. I'm glad they are finally releasing it.

Not only have you been hearing about it for years; it's also been released for years: F# 1.0 came out in 2006! The only difference here is that with the release of F# 2.0, it's now shipped by the Microsoft "product" teams instead of "research" teams: it's included in Visual Studio 2010 available in boxes on shelves, whereas previously it was available for download.

Which is actually a pretty big deal because it means the integration into VS will be greatly improved. I've not tried the VS 2010 F#, but the plugin version was pretty clunky within the IDE.

It's a big deal because now you can just go ahead and use it and no manager can complain that it's not an official language. Hackers sometimes forget how conservative the mainstream IT industry can be.

Yeah, I was pretty sure that I played with it when I was doing .NET in school... Thought I was going crazy.

Nope you weren't going crazy, you were just reading The Register. It's a kneejerk anti-MS site where all headlines must sufficiently glib before being accepted for publication. Blech.

There is a bit more to it than that. There's now a promise to no longer keep breaking binary compatibility. This part is an especially big deal.

Very stable and fast implementation. Just finished porting a Scala project and the F# code runs around 50% faster on CLR 4.0 compared to Scala on JRockit JVM.

Daniel B Markham wrote his Quote Feed project in F#.

Anybody using F# for web apps? Thoughts? Comparisons?

I've been thinking of this for a while. Although there is fswebtools that shares the same spirit as GWT http://tomasp.net/blog/fswebtools-intro.aspx, it's not as polished. IMHO, F# for the backend to provide web service, jQuery for the frontend, and with JSON as the intermediate protocol may be a good combo.

Intellifactory makes a commercial product for exactly this: http://www.intellifactory.com/

Write it all in F#, including using async workflows for seamless server-side calls, and have it compile down to JS.

They did make a good point: F#'s marketing is severely limited. It seems that Microsoft doesn't want to be in the position of saying "hey, here's a language that does everything C# does, plus a ton of extra great things, and the only drawback is the tool support".

Good to see an Aussie programming language out there. I hear the GC runs anti-clockwise...

Not only, but the JIT has a habit of chucking a sickie.

This article is wrong or incorrect at so many levels , i wonder why did it even get submitted and get as high as it is.

Microsoft bought a lot of goodwill from me when they productionized F#. Finally, functional programming that anyone will be allowed to use!

Then I found out that they want you to pay them $80 to change the desktop background in Windows 7 Starter.

So now I have forgotten about F#, and recommend Haskell instead. OCaml and Scala are also fine. Fuck Microsoft, they'll never change.

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