F#
The trend was barely detectable one or two years ago, but now is unmistakable: functional programming is making a big comeback. Actually, saying it this way is grossly unfair, because the research community in and around functional programming, despite being underfunded in the US, has continued to be a vibrant one. The major symposia in the field, such as the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), have continued to have strong attendance, large numbers of submissions, and by all accounts, very strong research results.
What is making the trend more visible today, though, is the emergence of multicore processor technology. The widespread use of this technology is raising major questions about software programming paradigms. While these questions are as old as the field itself, the fact that every desktop, laboratory cluster, and supercomputer is affected creates a practical urgency that didn’t exist in the same way just ten years ago. Fully exploiting multicore technologies seems to require a level of fine-grained parallelism that is apparently too hard to manage in conventional imperative languages, and so even hard-core systems researchers are beginning to look to functional programming’s natural affinities in parallelism for inspiration, if not solutions.
Today, Bob Harper and I received an email from David Tarditi. Dave is a former PhD student of ours, and now he directs a research group looking at new software concepts in operating systems and networks. His email:
Bob & Peter:
I think you’ll find the following news interesting. Microsoft plans to create a product version of F#, Don Syme’s variant of ML. Microsoft will be including ML as one of its officially supported languages in Visual Studio. [Emphasis added by me.] The other officially supported languages are C#, Visual Basic, C++, and Python. Below is the blog entry from S. Somasegar, VP of the Developer Division at Microsoft about F# and functional programming. The Developer Division creates the programming tools and programming environments shipped by Microsoft and S. Somasegar leads the entire division.
Dave
The link to S. Somasegar’s blog entry can be found here. It’s pretty interesting reading.
Peter Lee @ October 17, 2007