Microsoft.NET Family Welcomes F# To Be As First Class .NET Language

F#, the functional programming language incubated by Microsoft Research is now elevated as 1st class .NET programming language. This brings F# to be hand in hand with .NET framework which allows seamless integration with other .NET programing languages like C#,VB.NET. Also F# will be fully integrated with Visual Studio IDE to provide the development environment which every developer love to work with. 

How is F# Pronounced?

F# is pronounced as F-sharp which is very similar to the way C#(C-Sharp) is pronounced.

What type of language is F#?

F# is a functional programming language which is derived from ML family of languages. Here is the Wikipedia definition for functional programming and ML family of languages

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at the University of Edinburgh,[1] whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage as it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover (the language of which ML was the metalanguage is pplambda, a combination of the first-order predicate calculus and the simply-typed polymorphic lambda-calculus). It is known for its use of the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm, which can automatically infer the types of most values without requiring explicit type annotations.

What are the goals of F#?

F# is developed to implement the core features of ML programming on the .NET platform to bring the benefits of .NET and ML-style programming to the scientific, engineering and high performance computing communities.

As a developer what I can expect from F#?

F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. F# gives you a combination of

• interactive scripting like Python

• the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment like MATLAB

• the strong type inference and safety of ML

• a cross-compiling compatible core shared with the popular OCaml language

• a performance profile like that of C#

• easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools

• a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme

• the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration

• the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations

• the speed of native code execution on the concurrent portable, and distributed .NET Framework

Read more about F# at Microsoft Research