F#: MS trying to copyright the Alphabit?

[oppo]

"F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. F# gives you a combination of ......."

http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx

Next we will see G# even though F# isn't fully developed and no one uses it. Before G# is released H# will be in the works and so on....

[G_Morgan]

Well they didn't want to call it OCaml#, nobody likes to be seen copying.

//edit - by the way I think it's great that MS are supporting a functional language rather than just tacking those features onto C#. C# was starting to look like the infamous octopus made by strapping 4 extra legs onto a dog.//

[John]

Funny you bring this up, Jordan and I were having a discussion about it not too long ago. Microsoft as C#, F# AND J# [Visual J# Home]

[G_Morgan]

J# already has a planned death as I understand it. Never saw the point of it, C# looks enough like Java that you can easily cover the distance in a few hours anyway. Then again I'm one of those who says VB.Net is pointless and you may as well go all the way to C#.

F# is a totally different beast. It's object oriented but the main focus is on functional concepts like first class functions, lambdas and closures. I suppose you can think it the negative of C#. C# is an OOP language with support for some functional concepts, F# is a functional programming language with some support for OOP concepts.

Personally I prefer that balance. The Pareto principle applies strongly to OOP, the first 20% of functionality is 80% of the use case. I find the more tricky concepts are better handled via functional rather than OOP concepts (best example, closures over anonymous classes). Most of the higher level OOP stuff seems like hacks put together to account for a lack of closures, higher order functions or proper semantic macros.

[monkey_instinct]

Very funny language. It seems to me like a spaghetti of programming paradigms, framework integration and exceeded functionality. It's just like Ada on its early days. It had everything, but no one dare to learn all that stuff.

[TcM]

Remember that this is an MS language.. I bet that if they distribute these (like they did in my country) with a student package.. I believe that people will get interested.

I don't know.. let's see.

[G_Morgan]

Originally Posted by TheComputerMaster

Remember that this is an MS language.. I bet that if they distribute these (like they did in my country) with a student package.. I believe that people will get interested.

I don't know.. let's see.

That's the point. It isn't. It literally is OCaml with a few extensions to allow interfacing to .Net code. I'm not sure whether to praise MS for avoiding NIH syndrome or curse them for taking a perfectly good language and rebranding it as if it is their own invention. In any case I'm glad we might just see a functional language get some sort of mainstream attention (.Net pisses over Java here, the platform has much better support for functional concepts, should change for Java 7 assuming Sun don't bottle it).

Very funny language. It seems to me like a spaghetti of programming paradigms, framework integration and exceeded functionality. It's just like Ada on its early days. It had everything, but no one dare to learn all that stuff.

I don't think it particularly convulted. It's just Caml with objects (hence Objective Caml). You can easily create an object system in most functional programming languages, this just sets a standard object system so that people can better share code. It's far cleaner than C#, C++ or even Java these days.