The functional side of things (in Visual Studio)

A great announcement about F# was posted yesterday by Soma on his blog. Basically, he lets us know that F# is going to make it into Visual Studio. Being a person firmly rooted in the academic world, I can't say how happy I am with this particular decision. Although things like lambda expressions and LINQ are based on functional programming techniques, a 'pure' functional programming language is not yet available in Visual Studio. It seems that now Microsoft decided on moving the F# project from Microsoft Research to the mainstream of software development. It's just another great example of something that is born inside Microsoft Research and after a couple of years surfaces into a product (just think about those cool data mining algorithms we use today in SQL Server).

Personally, I felt many times during my developer experiences the lack of something as powerful as a functional programing language. At times, things that I was working hard to express using C# for example, could have been done a whole lot easier in the functional style. And remember, I'm a huge C# fan. The thing that F# is going to be one of the available choices in Visual Studio makes my developer personality very very happy. In the same time, my academic personality is equally happy to see that Microsoft is really committed towards making the .NET Framework a great choice for the folks in the academic environment.

As Don Syme mentions on his blog, this marks the "end of the beginning" for F#. So, what can I say? Happy End of the Beginning F#!