Rob Burke on F#

Rob Burke has just written a blog entry on F#: It was great to have Rob to visit - I first met Rob when you presented his Symphony system - an amazing example of .NET in action! Rob is currently an all-round developer guru working with Microsoft in Ireland and is well known across Europe and further afield. In his blog entry y

ou even get to see me with Ralf and Thore of the Applied Games Group out at the Eagle in Cambridge. But it's really about F# - h

ere's a quote from Rob:

 

But the why of functional programming is just as important as the what. I definitely had my eureka moment while Don was walking me through F#, by way of an impromptu riff on some of his F# "getting started" materials. Not only are the F# language and environment ideal for prototyping, interactive scripting (think Python) and interactive visualization (think Matlab), but there are also some abstractions and concepts that are much more easily described in a functional language like F#.

There's an awesome F# demo (pictured here) that you can step through yourself, where F# taps into Managed DirectX to display a graph and other 3D information in real-time. You can visualize the results, and even change them, using the immediate window, and use your mouse to navigate the interactive window. Absolutely killer demo.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2006
  Thanks again for the great walkthrough of F# - I had a great time at MSRC.  And that really is an impressive demo!