[nycbug-talk] instructions for building f# on freebsd

[Justin Dearing]

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:

>
>>
> I am new to F# - is there a good tutorial and/or good usecase of when I
> would want to use F#?  It looks like it is built on top of Microsoft's .NET
> CLR - is that a good thing?
>
>
I'll try to answer objectively. I've never written F# personally. I've
written a lot of CLR code in C# and powershell, and when forced at gunpoint
VB.NET. I don't have a suggestion for a tutorial. As far as when you want
to use it, its an extension of OCAML, and there is an option to compile
pure OCAML code. Its a really good language for implementing algotithims.
Its not good for "plumbing code." So as an example, if you were writing a
daytrading system in the CLR, you code to talk to the bloomberg terminal,
and talk to the system that executes the trade should be in C#. The code
that's taking your data from your bloomberg terminal and doing all kinds of
crazy math to determine when and what to buy and sell should be in F#.

F# is apache licensed[1] and bundled in mono. I've never seen an instance
of Microsoft harming an open source .NET project via copyright or patent
claims. Miguel, the head of mono has a commercial  business that produces
Visual Studio plugins to let you develope in the CLR and deploy on android
and iphone[2]. Microsoft hosted the 2010 monospace conference in the NERD
center in MIT (where I happened to speak about Mongodb). So in a very
pragmatic sense, as a person who produces and consumes lots of open source
code that compiles to the CLR, Its not a bad thing IMHO.

Footnotes:
1.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2010/11/04/announcing-the-f-compiler-library-source-code-drop.aspx
2. http://xamarin.com/
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