Chicago ALT.NET User Group

May 2009 Meeting

F# Outside the Lab

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It seems that almost every time we hear about F# being used it is always in a experimental setting or in a niche application. Maybe that's a common trait that F# shares with many other functional programming languages and its roots in the Microsoft Research labs.

Alex Pedenko has been exploring uses for F# for day-to-day programming tasks and he will be sharing his experience with the group in this talk.

Alex will start with a quick introduction to F# but it would work best if you could at least skimmed over some tutorial or video just to get the basic syntax and feel of the language.

Alex has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

He has spent roughly 6 months researching f#, its applicability to business systems, and viability in a commercial environment.

He adds:

I like long walks on the beach... er.. wait, that's for a different site :)

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion (if the 1st portion doesn't run late). Functional programming, either in a real functional language or in C#, JavaScript, Ruby, etc, which support some of the same constructs, is making inroads on software development. Is it the next big thing or just one more thing in our toolbox?