Functional programming is the best approach to solving many thorny computing problems,but pure FP isn’t suitable for general-purpose programming. So, FP languages have gradually embraced aspects of the imperative and OO paradigms, remaining true to the FP paradigm but incorporating features needed to easily write any kind of program. Some of the most popular functional languages, including OCaml, Haskell, Lisp, and Scheme, have traditionally been implemented using custom runtimes, which leads to problems such as lack of interoperability.
F# is a general-purpose programming language for .NET, a general-purpose runtime. F# smoothly integrates all three major programming paradigms.With F#, you can choose which ever paradigm works best to solve problems in the most effective way. You can do pure FP, if you’re a purist, but you can easily combine functional, imperative, and object-oriented styles in the same program and exploit the strengths of each paradigm. Like other typed functional languages, F# is strongly typed but also uses inferred typing, so programmers don’t need to spend time explicitly specifying types unless an ambiguity exists. Further, F# seamlessly integrates with the .NET Framework base class library (BCL).Using the BCL in F# is as simple as using it in C# or Visual Basic (and maybe even simpler).F# was modeled on Objective Caml (OCaml), a successful object-oriented FP language, and then tweaked and extended to mesh well technically and philosophically with .NET. It fully embraces .NET and enables users to do everything that .NET allows. The F# compiler can compile for all implementations of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), it supports .NET generics without changing any code, and it even provides for inline Intermediate Language(IL) code. The F# compiler not only produces executables for any CLI but can also runon any environment that has a CLI, which means F# is not limited to Windows but can run on Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and OpenBSD. The F# compiler can be integrated into Visual Studio, supporting IntelliSense expression completion and automatic expression checking. It also gives tooltips to show what types have been inferred for expressions. Programmers often comment that this really helps bring the language to life.
F# was invented by Dr. Don Syme and is now the product of a small but highly dedicatedteam he heads at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Cambridge, England. However, F# is not just aresearch or academic language. It is used for a wide variety of real-world applications, whosenumber is growing rapidly.Although other FP languages run on .NET, F# has established itself as the de facto .NET functional programming language because of the quality of its implementation and its superb integration with .NET and Visual Studio.
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