F# as a Second .NET Language
(Harry is @ DevTeach in Vancounver with his family this week. He was hoping to still do Morning Coffee posts, but that’s turned out to be infeasible. So instead, you get a series of pre-written posts about F#.)
I’ve been spending some real quality time with F# of late. I’ve been getting into parsing again, and it turns out that functional pattern matching languages like F# are really good at text processing. After claiming I’d learn F# this year, then abandoning the effort to learn Powershell, I went back to F#. Nothing against PowerShell – I’ve moved over to using it as my primary command line shell and have tricked out my startup script and everything. But I haven’t found much need to code in it lately.
If you’re a .NET ninja guru, you owe it to yourself to take a long look at F#, if for no other reason to expand your mind. It takes a while to get used to. Don Syme (aka father of F#) can attest I’ve been peppering him with questions (Thanks, Don!). I’ve also been writing code in C# and F#, and looking at the result in Reflector so I can understand what’s happening. I certainly am not an F# expert by any stretch, but I do think I’m getting the hang of it.
Since I’ve reached this first plateau of getting it, I thought I’d write out some of the things I like and don’t like about the language. This is by no means an introduction to F#. I’d recommend Robert Pickering’s Foundations of F# book as well as Don’s Expert F# book (when it comes out). You should also be reading Luke Hoban‘s and Jomo Fisher‘s blogs – they both just joined the F# team. C# MVP Tomas Petricek has written several blog posts introducing F#, which he’s brought together in a single post. For an general overview of functional programming (the primary programming paradigm of F#), check out Slava Akhmechet’s Functional Programming For The Rest of Us.
This turned into a fairly long post, so I split it out into a series that I’ll post thru the end of the week.
Update: added link to Tomas Petricek’s F# Introduction