Functional Programming in the .NET World…

Recently a post from one of my ex-colleagues got me interested in working my way through a set of problems at the ‘Project Euler‘ site. He piqued my interest, and I started working my way through them (not at any great speed mind – I’ve only done 4 so far – and I’ve been doing it for 3 days!!).

Then he posted another post about the problems and solving them in a functional way rather than errr…. non-functional – thanks Steve! Now I feel compelled to look into the functional world, and with good reason from a .net development point of view.

F# is the Microsoft Research functional language, and is designed to fit in nicely with the .NET framework, and (indeed) Visual Studio. To be honest, I haven’t explored much beyond looking at the examples and playing with them – but it looks good. In line with what Steve (hackinghat.com) said, I too haven’t really played with functional programming since uni, though in my case, that’s only 4-5 years ago now 🙂