Why F#?

When I started using F# I didn’t know what it would be like. But when I coded the Runge-Kutta method and a core of my ballistic calculation project in a few hours, without any errors and bugs, spending no time debugging, I realised that functional programming is a very handy idiom for various computations.

I don’t know all of advantages of F#, but during this month I found what F# is

• Easy to learn and understand. You may not have a wide knowledge to start.
• Usually it’s much more expressive.
• It’s really difficult to make a bug!
• You can use .NET libraries and classes.
• You can combine Functional abilities with object oriented and imperative idioms.

Don’t be afraid of using it! It takes about two weeks to get accustomed to F#. You just need to have F# compiler to start. If you want to have IDE, my advise is downloading Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell.

I use following books as a source of information about F# and functional programming:

• Foundations of F#
• Expert F#
• A. Field, P. Harrison: Functional Programming, Addison-Wesley, 1988