F# and Scala in Lovely Lausanne

A quick update to my last posts: F# 1.9.1 is undergoing a few minor updates as we take on some excellent feedback from our users inside Microsoft.

In the meantime, I've headed to EPFL in Lausanne to spend 3 weeks skiing visiting the Scala team. I've known Martin Odersky, the designer of Scala, for some time now, and his joint work on generics in Java formed a major part of the background to our work on generics for C# and .NET 2.0. Indeed, I was last in Lausanne in 2001 when I presented .NET Generics to Martin and his team. 

For me F# is not just about the language, but about advancing typed functional programming in general, and so one of the key things for me is the chance to share ideas with other researchers in programming languages. Tomorrow I'll be presenting to the Scala group on F# active patterns as implemented in F# 1.9, a topic we presented two weeks ago to the C# team in Redmond, and which I've also been discussing with Simon Peyton-Jones in Cambridge. 

This is joint work with Gregory Neverov and James Margetson. We'll be putting out a technical report on this topic next week, but more importantly you'll be able to use the feature in earnest when F# 1.9.1 is released!