re: The Hub goes live

Adam — Fri, 12 May 2006 13:38:30 GMT

Fortran? Really? That's so retro it's awesome.

re: The Hub goes live

optionsScalper — Fri, 12 May 2006 18:30:29 GMT

Adam,

Actually, not Fortran. But that too is what I first thought last year when I adopted F#.

F# is based on ML/OCaml and is a research language from Microsoft Research Cambridge. While it is not a production language as of yet, it is CLS-compliant, plays well with others in the .NET suite, etc. The language is concise and allows for functional/imperative/OO constructs in any mixture.

The reason that I'm interested is that this language will likely become THE math/scientific computing platform for .NET. Because I can seamlessly integrate with all other .NET stuff, I can choose how to deploy F# in an application. I can use F# within SQL Server 2005, interop with C#, do some stuff with it in BizTalk, etc. I can also deploy F# in Web Services and WCF (Indigo). So where F# provides advantage in my scientific computing environment, I can use it and still continue to use my other tools as needed.

Having been a big MatLab, Mathematica, Maple, S-Plus, R and other math engine user, I am also glad to move to F#. Data used for any research needs to be shuttled to the compute engine and if I have to cross a program boundary into MatLab or Mathematica for example, I'm beholden to their interface, it's robustness and performance. With F#, I incur none of those penalties and am free to work out architecture and design issues for large scale models.

Check out Chad's article that I linked above. He just did a proof of concept to run F# on a Virtual Supercomputer, i.e. deployment of F# compute engines on a grid of machines.

---O

p.s. F# supports BigInts and BigRationals (arbitrary precision math) as first-class language types. I know the F# team has just completed some work to further optimize those types and related operations. Crypto work that requires large number use becomes easier with F#.