sutton036

Very interesting video interview here with Rich Hickey of Clojure and Joe Pamer of F# side-by-side. When the interviewer asks Rich Hickey what he thinks of F#, he says "I think F# is very cool" and then explains why. Rich Hickey is, of course, a visionary among programming language developers having single-handedly built a self-sustaining business around his own Clojure language. Remarkably, there are already more Clojure jobs than OCaml jobs according to IT Jobs Watch and there are now twice as many Google searches for Clojure as there are for OCaml:

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...