ML 2021 – Keynote: Narratives and Lessons from The Early History of F#

https://icfp21.sigplan.org/details/mlfamilyworkshop-2021-papers/15/Keynote-Narratives-and-Lessons-from-The-Early-History-of-F-

Functional programming is now a mainstream technique in nearly all programming languages, and F# has been part of this story. I’ll talk a walk through the early history of F#, starting with the origins of strongly-typed functional programming (FP) in the 1970s, through to its convergence with industry concerns in the 2000s and through to today. F# started as one of many responses to the “object-oriented tidal wave” of the mid-1990s, developing as a practical “functional-first” language incorporating enough object programming to be practical, interoperable and productive. Along the way F# “broke some rules” of functional language design and implementation (for example by relying on a runtime built for OO languages), yet also helped propagate FP design elements (e.g. generics, async, unions, immutable collections, tuples, records, pattern matching, non-nullness…) deep into some of the most conservative-minded parts of the industry (C#, Javascript/Typescript, Python, …). Along the way it has stayed true to its core design goals of succinct, robust, performant programming in practical delivery contexts.