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Here’s a Channel 9 video shot at Emerging Languages Camp 2010, the first conference on up-and-coming programming languages held in Portland on July 21 – 22. It’s a casual conversation with:

• Rich Hickey, creator of the Clojure (pronounced “closure”) programming language. It’s a dialect of Lisp intended general-purpose functional programming language with a lot of support for concurrent programming. If you caught our Ignite Your Coding webcast with Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin earlier this year, you heard his high praise for the language. Clojure targets both the JVM and CLR.
• Joe Pamer, compiler developer for the F# programming language. F# is a “hybrid” programming language, built with functional programming in mind, but also programmable in a more imperative object-oriented way. Much of it is compatible with the OCaml programming language, there are some C# ideas in there as well, and it’s one of the languages baked right into Visual Studio 2010.

In this conversation, Rich and Joe talk about their ideas on programming language design and evolution, functional programming, concurrency, how F# fits into Visual Studio and the granddaddy of them all, Lisp.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

F# (pronounced “eff sharp”) is multi-paradigm .NET programming language that supports both imperative object-oriented and functional programming styles. It’s a dialect of the ML programming language and very close to OCaml. Used as a functional programming language, F# gives you expressive power that’s tricky to duplicate in your run-of-the-mill imperative programming languages. As a .NET programming language, you can integrate modules written in F# into C# and Visual Basic projects, with F# doing the data-crunching, and C# or VB handling the user interface.

Justin Lee talked to me about starting a Toronto F# study group a couple of weeks ago at Toronto CodeCamp, and he’s holding the first meeting this Thursday, May 7th at 6:00 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina Avenue). He says that in this first meeting, he wants to start talking about the study group itself and cover a few simple “getting started with F#” exercises.

There’s nothing like a taking up a new programming language to stretch your brain, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that functional programming concepts are the future. The F# Study Group is an opportunity to get started, and the Dark Horse is a pretty nice setting with great coffee.