F# in Education – Programming the New Generation

Computer Science

F# in Education – Programming Fast Facts Project Principal: the New Generation Don Syme, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research F# is a simple, type-safe, and efficient functional programming lan- Judith Bishop, guage with special expressiveness in parallel programming, scripting, Director, Computer Science, and algorithmic development. F# combines the advantages of typed Microsoft External Research functional programming with a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system and the Microsoft .NET library and tools base. Websites: F#: http://www.fsharp.org/ # provides type-safe, succinct, efficient and expressive functional programming Microsoft F# Developer Center: on the .NET platform. It is a simple and pragmatic language, and has particular http://msdn.microsoft.com/fsharp strengths in data-oriented programming, parallel programming, scripting, and F Pex4fun: algorithmic development. It offers access to the huge .NET library and tools base and http://www.pex4fun.com/ comes with a strong set of Microsoft® Visual Studio® development tools. This combi- nation has been so successful that the language is now a first-class language in Visual Studio 2010. Events: F# in Education Workshop: As a teaching language, F# has the advantage of being freely available for .NET http://research.microsoft.com/ as well as Mono, which means that students can develop programs on Windows®, fsharpined Macintosh, and Linux. At the moment, its richest experience is in Visual Studio 2010, but to support teaching of F#, Microsoft Research is working in conjunction with the Microsoft Technologies: F# community to ensure a consistent learning experience across all three platforms. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Several projects are underway for F# courseware, implementations, and compiler Microsoft .NET Framework open-sourcing. F# can also be run via any browser on the Pex4Fun social site, and in a lightweight Microsoft Silverlight® application. Other Technologies: MonoDevelop 2.4: http://monodevelop.com/

Microsoft External Research Microsoft External Research part- ners with academia, government, and industry to advance computer science education and scientific research that addresses some of the world’s most urgent and significant social and technological challenges. Along with investing cash, software, hardware, and research expertise to enable ground-breaking projects worldwide, External Research is committed to providing advanced technologies and services needed to support every stage of the research process. F# programming environment in Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft External Research http://research.microsoft.com/collabo- ration/

Microsoft Research has served as the incubation center for the development of F#, which began seven years ago. Microsoft has collaborated closely with members of the global research community to ensure optimal development of the language. As a productive language for typed functional and object-oriented programming on the .NET platform, F# is being adopted by companies that need to conduct algorithmic analysis of large quantities of business information. Known for its ability to make it easier for analysts to experiment with different data and derive analysis of a higher quality, F# has been selected as the language of choice by a major bank. It is also starting to be used in courses at universities in North America and in Europe

F# was developed by Microsoft Research, Cambridge, under the leader- ship of Don Syme.

Don Syme, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research - Cambridge.

Quotes

“Functional languages are ideal for teaching clear thinking for solving problems amenable to code solu- tions and it levels the playing field between beginners and experienced programmers. The first programming language taught has a substantial influence on what language students use when they have a free choice. F#, once it is platform independent, has the potential to become the first programming language.” Prof Susan Eisenbach, Dean of Learning and Teaching, Imperial College, United Kingdom

“F# programs tend to be much shorter than their equivalents in other languages, and the fewer lines of code required, of course, the higher the productivity. When F# is combined with Visual Studio, which provides help with remembering the methods attached to different data types and how to use those methods, productivity goes through the roof!” Prof Nigel Horspool, University of Victoria, Canada

“Our graduate course on Parallelism this Fall is full, even though it assumes no experience with functional programming or F#. The students are preparing the courseware themselves, and one of the topics we are studying is functional reactive programming (FRP) with continuous, time-varying behaviors. F#, with its rich graphics libraries, made it trivial to construct a super-fun assignment involving purely functional and interac- tive animation of a mock solar system.” Prof David Walker, Princeton University, United States

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