I was taking the elevator down after getting settled in my hotel room and as the doors opened I was awestruck by the sight of Don Syme sitting on a couch, typing away on his laptop. With a bit of trepidation I walked up to him and introduced myself. It was immediately obvious that he was both a very friendly fellow and very excited about something in particular.

Don turned his laptop to me and said “look at this”. It was a blog post detailing the release of F# under the Apache 2.0 license. Needless to say, my mind was blown. I was dumbstruck.

We then proceeded to dinner in the hotel restaurant. Miguel de Icaza was there, and if you know Miguel you know he’s the life of the party. He became even more animated when told about F# becoming open source and pledged to get the source integrated into Mono as soon as possible.

Later that night the Hotel turned into some kind of giant dance party and fashion show. Thinking of the day ahead we all returned to our rooms. I did sneak back down later though to grab a celebratory book-publishing nightcap with Ted Neward. It’s old hat for him, but I’m still reeling from it.

To be honest, I was a bit intimidated by the idea of speaking to a room full of PhDs. Because of this, I put far more thought and practice into this 30-minute presentation than any of the much longer talks I had given before. Having my material down pat, I was able to turn that anxiety into gusto with what I feel was great success.

While presenting I noticed that the entire room was laughing at my jokes at first but by the end most seemed rather serious. I took this to mean that many were offended by my critique of current teaching techniques. Had I been too heavy handed with my language?

Afterward my fears were allayed by the enthusiasm of those who came and spoke with me. Later, a swath of positive reviews confirmed that, while I may have been skirting the edge, I hadn’t gone too far. Even so, I think I’ll try to be a bit softer in my approach in the future. As they say, you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Photos Courtesy of Microsoft Research

That night I had dinner and drinks with some of the most brilliant people. Conversation ranged from type systems to the future of F# and Mono. I ended up staying up quite late talking with Tomas about his future plans. It looks as though he has a ton of great stuff for the F# community right on the horizon.

Photos Courtesy of Microsoft Research

The next day Howard and I took the train back to New York and discussed our plans for NYC-wide F# domination. Howard is almost single-handedly responsible for Credit Suisse’s rise as one of the biggest F# using companies. They now number over 100 F# users strong and continue to grow. Combined, we might just be unstoppable.

All-in-all I’d say that the event was a great success both personally and for F#. In a couple of years we’ll see some of the first big batches of graduates educated in statically typed functional programming. At that point, those the imperative object oriented camp will need to start playing catch-up.

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Tags: F#, F# in Education, Professional F# 2.0