F# on Mono

I learned something cool yesterday - F# runs on Mono! That means I can mess with it without having to use VMware!

I got interested in F# from hearing about it on Hanselmintes and .NET Rocks. For those who haven't heard of it, F# is a functional programming language, similar to OCaml, built on .NET. It's actually not an "official Microsoft product," but rather a project out of Microsoft Research, which is pretty cool.

Incidentally, working Microsoft Research is on my list dream jobs. I mean, how many organizations can boast of having had two Turing Award winners on staff? How could you not want to work someplace like that?

Anyway, the thing that excites me about F# is the combination of functional programming and its status as a first-class .NET language. I've been meaning to get up to speed on functional programming for a few years now, but I've just never gotten around to it. Learning LISP or ML always seemed on par with refreshing my Prolog and Ada skills - an interesting exercise, but not profitable in terms of marketability. I mean, how many Standard ML listing have you ever seen on Monster?

However, it looks like functional programming may start pushing more into the main stream. The current trend in hardware is that CPU speeds are flattening out and performance gains are being made by adding more processors or cores. However, most code today is not written to use more than one core/proc at a time. So we're going to have to start parallelizing our code to fully take advantage of the hardware. That's where functional programming comes in. Pure functions, by definition, have no side effects. So if you're writing pure functional programs, parallelism becomes much easier, as you have no worries about thread safety and whatnot.

So with F# I can now learn functional programming while using .NET. This means that I can leverage some of my existing knowledge while learning the new language, which always makes things go faster and smoother. It also means that this learning experience has some vague marketability, i.e. I can at least count it as .NET experience. In other words, it's not one of those "off in left-field" learning ventures like if I took up Intercal or APL. I'm not going to feel (as much) like I could be making better use of my time.

Anyway, it turns out that installing F# on Ubuntu 8.04 wasn't quite as painless as I had hoped. On the up side, the F# site does supply a ZIP archive with generic Mono-compatibile binaries and full source (under the MS shared-source license). However, it seems the binaries don't quite work right with Mono 1.2.6. That's fixable, though, thanks to Laurent Le Brun's article on using F$ 1.9.4.17 on Mono. Basically, the important thing is to remember to pass mono the --runtime=v2.0.50727 option when running the F# compiler or F# binaries.

I haven't been blogging much lately, but hopefully I'll be posting back in the coming months with tid-bits on F#. It's been a while since I tried to learn a new language, especially a non-procedural one, so I'm looking forward to it.

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