I have been experimenting with Microsoft's F# language, their version of ML / OCaml for the .NET Framework. Microsoft recently announced that F# will become an official part of Visual Studio, up there with C# and Visual Basic. I had never really used an ML-based language before, so I was not sure how big the learning curve would be, but I find that my knowledge of Haskell gets me far enough to feel comfortable writing simple programs after looking over the documentation for a few minutes. On top of that, the current pre-release version of F# has near perfect integration with Visual Studio, including an interactive REPL, debugging, and syntax completion. If you are in the market for a good functional language and are in the Microsoft developer ecosystem, F# seems like a great choice.
I'm not sure how much I will use F# at work, if at all, but it is good to see that functional languages are being taken very seriously at Microsoft now. Not only are the developments of F# encouraging, but each new version of C# adds more functional features, and I find myself using those features daily in my work.
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07 November 2008
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