F# Seminar at University of Washington, Seattle, Thursday, Jan 28

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I'll be giving a talk at UW in Seattle on Thursday, Jan 28, this week.

Hope to see you there!

Don Syme (Microsoft Research, Cambridge)
Host: Dan Grossman
Parallel and Asynchronous Programming with F#
CSE 520 Colloquium
Thursday, January 28, 2010
3:30pm,  

Abstract

F# is a succinct and expressive typed functional programming language in the context of a modern, applied software development environment (.NET), and Microsoft will be supporting F# as a first class language in Visual Studio 2010. F# makes three primary contributions to parallel, asynchronous and reactive programming in the context of a VM-based platform such as .NET:

  • (a) functional programming greatly reduces the amount of explicit mutation used by the programmer for many programming tasks
  • (b) F# includes a powerful "async" construct for compositional reactive and parallel computations, including both parallel I/O and CPU computations, and
  • (c) "async" enables the definition and execution of lightweight agents without an adjusted threading model on the virtual machine.

In this talk, we will look at F# in general, including some general coding, and take a deeper look at each of these contributions and why they matter