In 2008 I studied Common Lisp, which I found very enjoyable and useful. I do intend to continue my CL journey since I’m no where near the end. Pragmatic Programmers suggests learning a new language every year, so it’s time for me to pickup something else. I picked CL for 2008 because the s-expression syntax was new to me (if you don’t count college), and Lisp contained many interesting concepts that I was not familiar with. For 2009 I decided to use same strategy in picking my next language to learn. After thinking about it, I decided to go with F#.
What is F#? I’ll let Wikipedia do the explaining:
F# (pronounced F Sharp) is a multi-paradigm programming language, targeting the .NET Framework, that encompasses functional programming as well as imperative object-oriented programming disciplines. It is a variant of ML and is largely compatible with the OCaml implementation.
Why did I pick F#? In my day job, I work on a C# financial application that targets .NET Framework 3.5. I hope that after learning F# I might be able to inject some functional goodness in our application since it will compile down to the same IL. Even though F# is backed by Microsoft, it does run on multiple platforms via Mono, which is very important to me since I don’t use Windows at home. F# is compatible with OCaml, I figure I’ll kill two birds with one stone.
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