Developing in F#, latest member of the Visual studio family

By Elizabeth Thomas, Project Manager, RKC infotech (August 2009)  

F#, the latest member of the Visual Studio family of languages, offers some enticing advantages over C# and Visual Basic, stemming from its functional-object fusion nature. Originally a research language from Microsoft Research, F# has long been a “secret weapon” in the arsenal of .NET programmers for doing statistical- and mathematical-heavy coding. More recently, however, a growing number of developers have begun to see the inherent advantages implicit in writing functional code, particularly in the areas of concurrency. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming.

F# is a remarkable language for prototyping for the following reasons:

F# has an interactive mode allowing you to evaluate blocks of code directly, without compiling your entire project. 

Type inference helps keep code small, and makes refactoring your type hierarchy relatively painless. This may not be so important in production code.

F# integration with .NET makes it easy to prototype extensions of your existing products. In the all-too-common case when a prototype becomes a product (due to time constraints), it’s also easy to integrate your F# code within your .NET product. 

If prototyping makes up a significant part of your overall development process, then F# can really help you speed up your coding.

It is not that F# will produce code that is significantly faster than other .NET languages. The functional style of programming, in particular purity (no side-effects), can be applied to other programming languages, meaning it is just as easy to write concurrent programs in other languages as well. It does however "feel more natural" to do so in F#.

F# has the Option type, which can be used in place of null values. Code reliability with respect to null-pointer exceptions can be guaranteed at compile time, which is a huge benefit.

The more specific answer is: F# will help a lot for certain classes of applications, but may not do much at all for line-of-business apps. F# is well suited for math and science applications. The functional nature of F# can also help you write more reliable concurrent programs. Given the increasing number of multi-core processors, this might be quite valuable to you.

Industrial applications

Many companies are already adopting or investigating F# even though it is only available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) because the language is already useful for certain kinds of applications:

Investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and UBS already employ hundreds of F# programmers who build in-house software. 

Companies with products aimed at technical users are already moving to make their APIs F# friendly, such as DataSynapse . 

Some companies are already shipping software written in F# 

-Flying Frog Consultancy sell the libraries F# for Visualization and F# for Numerics that are written in F# and designed for F# programmers. 

-Coherent Graphics sell the Coherent PDF Toolkit for .NET which is end-user software written in F# and designed for use by non-programmers. 

 Advantages of F# 

F# is the world’s first language to combine all of the following features: 

Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically.  

Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees.  

Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. 

Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures.  

Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica.  

High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#.  

Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support.  

Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls.  

Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation.  

Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. 

Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations.  

Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. 

Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market.

Why F# is So Important to the Future of Software Development?

It has been thought a lot recently about why F# might be important to the future of all software development. If you think about it, there’s really little in F# that doesn’t already exist in other languages like OCaml and Haskell. But F# is significant and different because Microsoft is behind it and because of the tight integration with the .NET framework. But beyond the who of F# is the why of its importance. And the why, in one’s mind can be summed up with these five bullet points: 

ORMs are failing because the imperative, object-oriented languages in which we use ORMs are unfriendly to sets and tuples. The database is full of nothing but sets and tuples. So we read them into objects and wonder why there’s an impedence mismatch. F# is not only set and tuple friendly. You can’t really think properly in F# without these first-class constructs. 

F# is appearing at the right time and place in history to serve in the critical role of helping us to build new DSLs. 

F# allows us to revisit the time-honored design patterns that are workflow-oriented and view them in the light of functional decomposition. And the result this will allow many who have been unable to grasp those patterns though an imperative lense to "get it" for the first time. 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is predicated on the idea that strict operation contracts exist that takes discrete, strongly-typed inputs and return strongly-typed results. F# rolls like that. There’s no object-orientation in SOA, per se. But the workflow, scheduling and execution core of SOA will be based on functional languages like F# instead.