Don Syme, Microsoft Research

Don Syme is a Senior Researcher in the MSR Cambridge Programming Principles and Tools group. He joined MSR in 1998, and was the initiator, co-designer and co-implementer of Generics for .NET and C# 2.0. More recently he is the designer and co-implementer of the F# language and co-author of "Expert F#".

Presentation: "Introduction to F#"

Session: Languages

Time: Thursday 14:15 - 15:00

Location: Ballroom Le Grand 2

Abstract: Functional programming is a hot topic: there is a growing awareness of the importance of functional techniques in the developer community, and imperative programming has limitations in a networked and concurrent multi-core world. This session will introduce Microsoft's new language F#, a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework that combines the succinctness, expressivity, and compositionality of functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, interoperability, tools, and object model of.NET. This session will introduce you to the basics of F#. We'll take a look at why Microsoft is adding the language to the suite of those available on .NET, and at some of simple language constructs that make programming in F# a dream. We'll also take a look at how F# asynchronous workflows help you tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.

Presentation: "Languages Panel"

Session: Languages

Time: Thursday 16:30 - 17:15

Location: Ballroom Le Grand 2

Presentation: "Language Oriented Programming with F#"

Session: Scripting and DSLs

Time: Friday 13:00 - 13:45

Location: Ballroom Le Grand 2

Abstract: Language Oriented Programming is a programming paradigm that covers the many tasks associated with representing and manipulating information in language-based formats. This includes routine tasks such as parsing and language implementation, through to language-integrated queries via techniques such as LINQ. LOP is also an important technique in declarative programming, parallel programming and modelling. F# is a beautiful language for language-oriented programming tasks. This talk will explore the range of problems covered by LOP and look at how to apply F# to these problems. The time and again complex LOP problems have relatively simple and elegant solutions when using F#, and we'll take a look at some examples of how you can use F# to explore this problem domain.