F# Seminar Tomorrow, Tuesday, 26/1, at Berkeley

I'll be giving a seminar tomorrow, Tuesday, at Berkeley, visitng Benjamin Hindman and Rastislav Bodik. The talk will be from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm - room 320 in Soda Hall (moved from room 511). All welcome!

Title: Parallel and Asynchronous Programming with F#

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 the amount of explicit mutation used by the programmer for many programming tasks

   (b) F# includes an “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’ll look at F# in general, including some general coding, and take a deeper look at each of these contributions and why they matter.