F# and CCR
I mentioned a while back that I'd read Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis on building reliable distributed systems. Early on, Joe introduces Erlang, a language he and his team designed at Ericsson to build large-scale, fault-tolerant, concurrent systems.
I've no background at all in functional languages, but I was struck by 4 things (in no particular order):
- The code seemed to have hit a sweet-spot of readability and brevity. It's a compact syntax.
- The support of functions as first-class types (a feature of functional languages), allowed for some simple but powerful constructs.
- A lot of type inference (and a lot less typing!)
- Language support for message-passing primitives.
I won't expand particularly on these right now, but some of these features have crept into C#, notably limited type inference (i.e. the var keyword) and lambda functions (via succinct syntax for anonymous delegates).
Anyway, whilst reading round Erlang and functional languages in general, I discovered F#, a research language from the Microsoft Research group at Cambridge University, England. F# is a CLR language, with strong functional influences but with support also for imperative and object-oriented programming. (One of the principal developers, Don Syme, was one of the guys who worked out how to do generics on the CLR).
F# shares with Erlang the first 3 points above. And that got me thinking that the CCR, integrated through the F# could provide the fourth. You can use the CCR directly from F#, but wrapper functions make it easier still to add powerful concurrency and co-ordination support for task-based programming directly into F# in a natural way, and I'll blog about these in forthcoming posts.
