November 5, 2010

F# in Education Workshop

Location: Cambridge, MA, U.S.

F# in Education was a one-day workshop for educators and industrialists, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., on November 5, 2010. The workshop investigated F# as a possible teaching language, as well as its use in industry. Developments in cross-platform issues were highlighted. The venue was Microsoft’s vibrant New England Research and Development Centre on the scenic Charles River within reach of MIT, Harvard, and Boston Universities.

F# is simple, type safe, and efficient functional programming language with special expressiveness in parallel programming, scripting, and algorithmic development. F# combines the advantages of typed functional programming with a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system and the .NET library and tools base. F# is freely available for .NET and Mono development across Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has a very successful professional implementation in Visual Studio 2010. To support teaching of F#, Microsoft Research is working in conjunction with the F# community to ensure a consistent learning experience across all three platforms.

This workshop discussed the projects underway for F# courseware, implementations, and compiler open-sourcing. The workshop welcomed participation from all academics interested in F# as a possible teaching language, as well as from those in industry wanting to know what it can offer for them. The program offered a variety of talks covering all areas of use and implementation of the language.

F# originates from Microsoft Research Lab – Cambridge and the Microsoft Research F# team, led by Don Syme, in partnership with the Microsoft Developer Division. The workshop was organized by the Computer Science theme at Microsoft Research Lab – Redmond, led by Judith Bishop.