F# Moves Forward
Carl and Richard talk to Don Syme, the inventor of F#, along with F# PM Luke Hoban and MS Researcher Ralf Herbrich about the future of the F# language.
Guests:
Don Syme
Don Syme is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. His first major project at Microsoft was .NET Generics, which he proposed to the Microsoft Product teams in 1999 and saw through to productization in C#, VB and C++ in Visual Studio 2005. Since then he has been researcher and design lead on F#, which is now transitioning to a more official status through a partnership with the Microsoft Developer Division.
Luke Hoban
Luke Hoban is the Program Manager for F#. Before moving to the F# team, Luke was the Program Manager for the C# Compiler, working on C#3.0 and LINQ, which were recently released with Visual Studio 2008. Prior to that, Luke worked with the C# IDE group, and was responsible for the Visual Studio Express line of products which were launched in VS2005. He is very excited to be working on the F# programming language now, and is looking forward to bringing F# into the collection of first-class languages for .NET
Ralf Herbrich
Ralf Herbrich is also a researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, in machine learning. He uses F# every day in his work, which involves applying statistical analysis to massive data sets, particularly with regard to ranking problems. He received a credit on Halo 3 for his contributions to the TrueSkill ranking and matchmaking system used in that game.
Links:
- Microsoft Research for F# (sik) http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx
- Don Syme's Blog (sil) http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/
- Somasegar's Announcement about productizing F# (sim) http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/10/17/f-a-functional-programming-language.aspx