Tomas Petricek "Concepts behind the C# 3.0 language"

Tomas Petricek has written a piece on his take on the concepts behind C# 3.0 and their relationship to constructs in F# and other languages.

I find it interesting how stories like this get told: Tomas tells the story with a lot of mention of F# (which I like!), but I think he really means that as a placeholder for functional languages in general.  

If you're looking for a program to translate from F# to C#, you might like to start with Jon Harrop's Ray Tracer,  which I'll blog about shortly.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  I find myself trapped into using the available commercial languages.  This is a truly horrible experience requiring de-tuning of the brain.  Causes real pain after a long break. Articles like this are like a tonic.  There is hope even if only for our descendents.  It's will not always be a mind shackled world.  (Even without formal training in the vocabulary for talking about language features, it's very obvious that languages like COmega, F# and J are just better.) My main reluctance to testing F# is that it is a research language and I fear the long term implications of that.  (There's also potential issues in distributing work!) This article has tipped the balance a bit.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  Hi Mike, I would never say that F# etc. are just categorically better - C# is an incredibly innovative language and part of a wonderfully engineered platform, and I'm very proud to have had a big part in C# 2.0. But I do agree that we need to leave something even better for those that come after us :-)

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  Thanks for your nice comment :-) Yes, I really used F# in some cases as a placeholder for functional programming in general. However I think that for the C# team F# was very important (you probably know this better than me :-)), because F# shows how to compile some tricky "functional" constructs to CLR.