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F is for Functional

Microsoft Research’s F# programming language will be productized

By David Worthington

November 1, 2007 — (Page 1 of 2)
Anyone who thinks that functional programming languages are extinct everywhere but in the insular world of academia is in for a surprise. Microsoft is transferring an experimental programming language called F# (pronounced: F-sharp) from its research labs into its products. Now, Microsoft is ready to use what was nearly dismissed as yesterday’s technology to tackle the programming challenges of today.

F# is a hybrid functional and object-oriented programming language that was created by researchers at Microsoft's Cambridge, U.K., lab to demonstrate interoperability between different programming paradigms. It has roots in the ML family of functional programming languages and is compatible with OCaml. The researchers also drew concepts from C# and Haskell, another functional programming language.

A prototype F# plug-in for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 provides a graphical development workspace for developers. The plug-in assists with type inference, a feature present in strongly statically typed programming languages such as OCaml.

Functional programming languages such as APL, Erlang and Lisp treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. Object-oriented languages largely displaced them, as the industry opted for another layer of abstraction, retiring the “let” statement.

"I am a big fan of technology transfer between a research organization and a product development organization so that we can 'productize' the great research ideas and deliver to customers in a timely manner," wrote Microsoft developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar in an Oct. 24 blog posting. Somasegar pronounced F# as one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft since establishing its research division 15 years ago.

“Many computer science departments around the world teach functional programming languages today,” he claimed. “We believe that through F# and languages such as IronPython and IronRuby, we can help offer students and educators choices beyond the current mainstream and enable the use of these languages across the curriculum. This helps educators have the option to use Visual Studio as a consistent tool set from course to course,” Somasegar wrote.

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