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.
Currently .NET languages such as VB and C# do not support covariance and contravariance for generics. While this is not likely to chance in the near future, people at Microsoft are talking about it.
Laird Nelson describes his frustrations with understanding Java Generics. While clear in the simple case, as he works through a more complicated scenario, he ends up throwing them away because they're so complicated. Are we helping or hurting ourselves by using Generics?
