F#

[d000hg]

Ok.

Let's pretend.

Let's pretend I'm your PM or line manager.

What business case would you put for using F# (or Haskell, or some other never-used-in-real-world-language)?

Haskell IS used commercially (a bit), it's been around for nearly 20 years after all.

If you were working on something that used lots of very involved algorithms and a lot of concurrency, a functional language could be a reasonable choice... if you can find anyone to program it.

[bogeyman]

Fair dos.

I'm finding it fun more because it's a different way of thinking, and I think it could be beneficial to furthering skills in C#.

C# is certainly heading in a functional direction with the introduction of lambda expressions etc, and there's even more functional stuff in 4.0. I think as time goes on, the 'best bits' of F# are likely to be sucked into C.

Yes. Mucked about with Lambdas but seems pretty alien to my way of doing things. Probably that's an indication of the programming model of the future though.

Software devs in 2050 will be laughing at our primitive object models - well, except for the COBOL programmers, who will still be productively employed

[jim2406]

Fair dos.

I'm finding it fun more because it's a different way of thinking, and I think it could be beneficial to furthering skills in C#.

C# is certainly heading in a functional direction with the introduction of lambda expressions etc, and there's even more functional stuff in 4.0. I think as time goes on, the 'best bits' of F# are likely to be sucked into C.

[bogeyman]

"its fun" doesn't mean "i think you should use it commercially": At no point did I say "I think people should use F# commercially"..

I was asking, out of interest, whether anyone had come across it being used in practice.

I'm not daft - given it's current status and the level of knowledge (IE Most people don't even know what it is) I would find it very hard to put together any business case for using it, and very easy to present a case against it

Yes, but you asked specifically about contracts. Contracts == commercial in my book.

Agree that functional languages are interesting in an academic way, but I wouldn't invest much time in them, unless it was a research project or something.

Did you really find it 'fun'? Perhaps I just have a procedural brain or something but I wouldn't do things like F# or Haskell for fun.

[jim2406]

"its fun" doesn't mean "i think you should use it commercially": At no point did I say "I think people should use F# commercially"..

I was asking, out of interest, whether anyone had come across it being used in practice.

I'm not daft - given it's current status and the level of knowledge (IE Most people don't even know what it is) I would find it very hard to put together any business case for using it, and very easy to present a case against it

[bogeyman]

Has anyone seen any contracts asking for F# as a must or nice-to-have?

Used it a little @ current gig and really enjoyed it, having had some prior exposure to functional programming.

Also found it helped with better use of some of the functional stuff in C#, and some of the F# concepts are being introduced in C# 4.0... (tuples etc)

Not sure if anyone's likely to use it commercially any time soon, though I may learn it anyway, since it's fun!

Ok.

Let's pretend.

Let's pretend I'm your PM or line manager.

What business case would you put for using F# (or Haskell, or some other never-used-in-real-world-language)?

[_V_]

I did - nothing at all :-)

just curious..

That's incredible!!!

There are no jobs out there for an experimental, proprietary, unreleased, unsupported research language!

Must be the credit crunch!

[jim2406]

Google are the only company I've heard of hiring for functional language, but that was Haskell AFAIK.

Why don't you do a historical job search and see what comes up?

I did - nothing at all :-)

just curious..

[Diestl]

Has anyone seen any contracts asking for F# as a must or nice-to-have?

Used it a little @ current gig and really enjoyed it, having had some prior exposure to functional programming.

Also found it helped with better use of some of the functional stuff in C#, and some of the F# concepts are being introduced in C# 4.0... (tuples etc)

Not sure if anyone's likely to use it commercially any time soon, though I may learn it anyway, since it's fun!

Saw it for a contract for Microsoft Research, developing their .NET based functional language.

[d000hg]

Google are the only company I've heard of hiring for functional language, but that was Haskell AFAIK.

Why don't you do a historical job search and see what comes up?

[Badger]

F#

I thought you were swearing.

[jim2406]

Has anyone seen any contracts asking for F# as a must or nice-to-have?

Used it a little @ current gig and really enjoyed it, having had some prior exposure to functional programming.

Also found it helped with better use of some of the functional stuff in C#, and some of the F# concepts are being introduced in C# 4.0... (tuples etc)

Not sure if anyone's likely to use it commercially any time soon, though I may learn it anyway, since it's fun!