Speaker: Ivan Towlson
C# and Visual Basic reconsidered - Imperative - Textual - No extensibility mechanisms - Minimal abstraction over the underlying machine The assembly languages of the CLR F# - A functional-object hybrid - Included in Visual Studio 2010 - A CLR language You can call C# or Visual Basic components from F# You can call F# components from C# or Visual Basic F# Features With C#/VB Equivalents First class functions Similar to .NET delegates Lambdas and closures Similar to C# lambdas Type inference Similar to C# var, but used much more extensively You rarely have to write explicit type annotations in F# Comprehensions Similar to LINQ Quotations Similar to expression trees F# Idioms Emphasis on functions rather than records Rich data type support: options, tuples, discriminated unions Pattern matching Immutable by default Helps with asynchronous and parallel programming “Expressions that have values” instead of “statements that perform actions” F# Interactive REPL Try out your code as you go (tip: Alt+Enter!) F# Features Asynchronous workflows and agents Example: parallel or cloud computing interop Starcraft Computation expressions Customising how a sequence of expressions is executed Parser generator Example: simple macro or expression languages Units of measure Example: scientific or financial computation
