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Don Syme, creator of the F# programming language, recently gave a superb lecture on parallel and concurrent programming using F# at QCon 2010. Video and slides hosted by InfoQ here . Parallel programming continues to be a hot topic in the face of multicore computing but, as Don points out, the world is also moving steadily towards more concurrent programming. Work continues on our forthcoming "Multicore .NET" book that studies parallel programming using C# and F# in detail...

Sadek Drobi has interviewed many interesting people in the past and his interviews are of particular interest because Sadek is not afraid to ask difficult questions. Sadek recently published an interview with Don Syme, a lead developer of .NET generics and F#. In particular, Sadek asks why the experiments at Microsoft Research in writing SML and Haskell implementations on top of .NET led Don to build an eager language rather than a non-strict language like Haskell. Don describes the "dissonance" between non-strict evaluation and .NET that culminates in excessive use of monads making it unnecessarily tedious to reuse the framework, as well as the efficiency and debugging problems imposed by non-strict evaluation. Don then goes on to discuss some of the other features of Haskell that F# does draw upon, such as type classes. In particular, Don explains how he carefully separated the proven foundations of such features, such as the use of type classes for overloading as they we...