F#: History, Today, Tomorrow
Don Syme discusses the history of F#, how it came about, the current status of the language, especially its simple model supporting parallel and asynchronous programming, and a preview of F# 3.0.
Don Syme discusses the history of F#, how it came about, the current status of the language, especially its simple model supporting parallel and asynchronous programming, and a preview of F# 3.0.
Don Syme overviews some of the basic features of functional languages, presenting why and when they are useful for parallel programming: simplicity, composability, immutability, lightweight reaction, translations, data parallelism, using F# examples but addressing the larger spectrum of functional languages including Haskell, Erlang, Clojure and JavaScript.

Don Syme presents F# basics, a typed functional language for .NET that combines the succinctness, expressivity, and compositionality of functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, interoperability, tools, and object model of .NET.

In this interview made by Sadek Drobi, Don Syme speaks about F# 2.0, its application fields, its integration in Visual Studio 2010 and F# open source Power Pack library. Don also discusses the genesis of F#, the ties with OCaml as well as its specificity. He explains how did OOP and FP mix into one language and mentions some of the language's design decisions and compromises he had to take.

In this interview made by InfoQ’s Sadek Drobi, Don Syme, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, answers questions mostly on F#, but also on functional programming, C# generics, type classes in Haskell, similarities between F# and Scala.