This introductory chapter will address some of the major questions you may have about F# and
functional programming (FP).
What Is Functional Programming?
Pure functional programming views all programs as collections of functions that accept
arguments and return values. Unlike imperative and object-oriented programming, it allows no
side effects and uses recursion instead of loops for iteration. The functions in a functional
program are very much like mathematical functions because they do not change the state of the
program. In the simplest terms, once a value is assigned to an identifier it never changes,
functions do not alter parameter values, and the results that functions return are completely new
values. In typical underlying implementations, once a value is assigned to an area in memory, it
does not change. To create results, functions copy values and then change the copies, leaving
the original values free to be used by other functions and eventually be thrown away when no
longer needed. (This is where the idea of garbage collection originated.)
The mathematical basis for pure functional programming is elegant, and FP therefore provides
beautiful, succinct solutions for many computing problems, but its stateless and recursive nature
makes the other paradigms convenient for handling many common programming tasks.
However, one of F#’s great strengths is that you can use multiple paradigms and mix them to
solve problems in the way you find most convenient.
Why Is Functional Programming Important?
When people think of functional programming, they often view its statelessness as a fatal flaw
without considering its advantages. One could argue that since an imperative program is often
90 percent assignment, and a functional program has no assignment, a functional program
could be 90 percent shorter. However, not many people are convinced by such arguments or
attracted to the ascetic world of stateless recursive programming, as John Hughes pointed out
in his classic paper “Why Functional Programming Matters.”
The functional programmer sounds rather like a medieval monk, denying himself the
pleasures of life in the hope that it will make him virtuous.
John Hughes, Chalmers University of Technology
(http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html)
To see the advantages of functional programming, you must look at what FP permits rather than
what it prohibits. For example, functional programming allows you to treat functions themselves
as values and pass them to other functions. This might not seem all that important at first
glance, but its implications are extraordinary. Eliminating the distinction between data and
function means that many problems can be more naturally solved. Functional programs can be
shorter and more modular than corresponding imperative and object-oriented programs.
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In addition to treating functions as values, functional languages offer other features that borrow
from mathematics and are not commonly found in imperative languages. For example,
functional programming languages often offer curried functions, where arguments can be
passed to a function one at a time and, if all arguments are not given, the result is a residual
function waiting for the rest of its parameters. It’s also common for functional languages to offer
type systems with much better power-to-weight ratios, providing more performance and
correctness for less effort.
What Is F#?
Functional programming is the best approach to solving many thorny computing problems, but
pure FP often isn’t suitable for general-purpose programming. Because of this, FP languages
have gradually embraced aspects of the imperative and OO paradigms, remaining true to the
FP paradigm but incorporating features needed to easily write any kind of program. F# is a
natural successor on this path. It is also much more than just an FP language.
Some of the most popular functional languages, including OCaml, Haskell, Lisp, and Scheme,
have traditionally been implemented using custom runtimes, which leads to problems such as
lack of interoperability. F# is a general-purpose programming language for .NET, a generalpurpose
runtime. F# smoothly integrates all three major programming paradigms. With F#, you
can choose whichever paradigm works best to solve problems in the most effective way. You
can do pure functional programming if you’re a purist, but you can easily combine functional,
imperative, and object-oriented styles in the same program and exploit the strengths of each
paradigm. Like other typed functional languages, F# is strongly typed but also uses inferred
typing so programmers don’t need to spend time explicitly specifying types unless an ambiguity
exists. Further, F# seamlessly integrates with the .NET Framework base class library (BCL).
Using the BCL in F# is as simple as using it in C# or Visual Basic (and maybe even simpler).
F# was modeled on Objective Caml (OCaml), a successful object-oriented functional
programming language, and then tweaked and extended to mesh well technically and
philosophically with .NET. It fully embraces .NET and enables users to do everything that .NET
allows. The F# compiler can compile for all implementations of the Common Language
Infrastructure (CLI), it supports .NET generics without changing any code, and it even provides
for inline Intermediate Language (IL) code. The F# compiler not only produces executables for
any CLI, but can also run on any environment that has a CLI, which means F# is not limited to
Windows but can run on Linux, Apple’s OS X and iOS, as well as Google’s Android OS.
The F# 2.0 compiler is distributed with Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2010, and available as
a plug-in for Visual Studio 2008. It supports IntelliSense expression completion and automatic
expression checking. It also gives tooltips to show what types have been inferred for
expressions. Programmers often comment that this really helps bring the language to life. F#
2.0 also has an open source release, licensed under the Apache License and is available from
http://github.com/fsharp.
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