F#: Really briefly, for today
F#, What the heck is F#? First of all it is a functional language that supports Object Oriented Programming, which is weird. One of the past languages that are functional in nature is FORTRAN, a language that was first created in 1953 and is still used in many engineering simulations. It is safe to say that FORTRAN put the US on the moon. So if F# just another FORTRAN? No, F# is related to OCAML (Oh-camel), but is a light version of OCAML. It does all kinds of wonderful things, and especially keeps the art of programming in a state of confusion, which is fine for me.
- Will F# replace C#? No
- Will C# replace C#? Uh? Oh I get it, this will be explained later
- Can F# do what a programming calculator do? Yes
- Why is it a big deal? It’s not, but it’s useful
So what is up with the C# replacing C# statement? In coding the statement x=x+1, in math, in some cases it would be seen as incorrect, F# would find that this is also unacceptable, to be covered later.
To get started, if you have Visual Studio 2010 Pro or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate then you got F#.
If you don’t have either one of those products, or don’t want to use them, then you can utilize F# with a Visual Studio 2010 Interactive Shell or even without a shell.
If the latter case go to: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=effc5bc4-c3df-4172-ad1c-bc62935861c5&displaylang=en and download both of the files, Run the installation.
If you want to experiment with the VS 2010 Interactive shell, it can only be seen on a machine without VS pro or VS ultimate, in those two cases F# is included so the interactive shell turns itself off. Download the VS 2010 Interactive shell and install it.
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8E5AA7B6-8436-43F0-B778-00C3BCA733D3
XAML can be used with F# and is usually the way that the user interface is developed. It is possible to use F# with the XNA and Phone, but it isn’t recommended.
Hope this gets you started!