F#

[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!

[Badger]

F#

I thought you were swearing.

[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?

[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.

[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..

[_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!

[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)?

[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]

"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]

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.