In this episode I talk with Richard Minerich. We cover his intro to F#, benefits of using F#, the inter-op story with the rest of the .NET Framework, and the direction of growth for F#.
Our Guest, Richard Minerich
http://richardminerich.com/
@rickasaurus on Twitter
rickasaurus on Vimeo
rickasaurus on GitHub
BayardRock on GitHub
Announcements
Listeners of Functional Geekery get 10% off CodeMesh 2014 when you use offer code fngeekery10.
The ErlangCamp organizers are giving listeners of Functional Geekery 15% off the price of tickets for ErlangCamp 2014 with offer code FNG15. This discount applies to tickets for dinner with the speakers as well.
Topics
About Richard Minerich
Bayard Rock
How Rick got into F#
Exposure to Clojure via attending Rich Hickey’s Ant Colony Simulation presentation
Rick’s take on a F# ant colony simulation
F# is a ML family language for the .NET runtime
“Less code is more”
Open sourcing of F# and tools
Growing adoption of F#
Bing Advertising system and Halo ranking system are built using F#
Finance Companies picked up F#
F# Type Providers
F# adoption growing in a Alt.NET style
Type Erasure in F#
Properly encoded types, drastically reduces bug
Expressions not statements
F# is single pass, but leads to low dependencies
C# vs F# dependencies in projects blog post
“Put your functions in a data structure and call them after lookup”
Good places to prove out usage of F#
“All problems are better solved in F#” than C#
Pattern Matching to help with complicated domain logic
Great for testing C# code
Simple Made Easy
F# is simple, but with depth
Interoperability between F# and C#
Dependencies availability in F#
Type Providers for calling into other languages
F# expanding to OS X and Linux via Mono
Why Rick has interest in Haskell
Idris and dependent types
F# Tutorials
Presenting at CodeMesh 2014
Editor’s Note – After the call finished recording, Rick mentioned another good place for introducing F# is the build process, by using Fake
A giant Thank You to David Belcher for the logo design.