Keynote: Narratives and Lessons from The Early History of F#
summary
Covers why F# keeps the core OCaml experience: start with OCaml-like syntax and type inference, run on the .NET VM for generics and performance, and trade some theoretical purity for pragmatic interoperability. Describes concrete artifacts: a 3,000‑line F# script that generated the Louvre Abu Dhabi roof, type providers for external data, and computation expressions that unify async, queries and sequences. Gives adoption milestones: cross‑platform and fully open source by 2014–2016, and small but real usage stats for units of measure (roughly 3–5% using them, ~0.5% using algebraic properties).
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chapters (45)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:35Meta Talk
- 5:35History
- 5:57Personal Journey
- 6:35Communities
- 7:06Things Don’t Just Happen
- 8:08Traditions Collide
- 10:54Core Experience
- 12:05Contradictions
- 16:00No one was using relatively speaking
- 17:53ML owns the world
- 18:53Strongly Typed Languages
- 19:29The 1980s–90s
- 20:44The 1986–1998 Tsunami
- 22:17Giving up
- 22:51Retreat to the Fort
- 24:13Let There Be a Pure World
- 26:02Examples
- 27:05Rational Deconstruction
- 28:00Object-Oriented Languages
- 28:38Pizza
- 29:37History Scholar
- 33:08COM+
- 33:49Language Innovation
- 34:22Early Prototypes
- 35:12Does the Language You Use Make a Difference?
- 36:08Why F# Was Born
- 36:46Microsoft Bindings
- 37:07.NET
- 39:56What Directions Can We Go?
- 45:59Facing contradictions
- 46:24The SigPlan Dialectic
- 48:10Object Programming in F#
- 48:46Object-Oriented Programming
- 51:42F# Approach
- 52:01The Sweet Spot
- 53:21Patent Matching
- 54:47Lambda the Ultimate
- 55:42C#
- 56:32F#
- 57:30Computational modalities
- 58:06Queries
- 58:24asynchronous programming
- 58:56async/await
- 59:22type providers
