Wednesday, November 22, 2006

F# -- Evil Empire's Venture into Functional Languages

One thing I heard at SC06 last week was a Microsoft developer mention F#, Microsoft's offering in the functional language arena running on the CLR (.NET runtime) that he claimed made use of the best features of Scheme, Haskell, and OCaml. I remember giving a presentation of IA+ back in 2001 to my research group, with a Microsoft researcher in the audience mention that Microsoft had grant money for developing functional languages for .NET. It's pretty rare to find funding for language development, so I'm curious to know the origins of F#, whether it is purely in-house, brought in from the outside, or a combination.

1 comment:

Susan's Husband said...

Dr. H had a friend in graduate school who was a major language weenie (very big in to ML) who was hired by the Dark Empire 4 or 5 years ago for "advanced research". This is exactly the kind of thing he'd do, so maybe enough people like him were hired to get the project approved.