There’s a new place in town for you to geek out over F#, as well as the http://cs.hubfs.net new there’s also a face book group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5394519167&ref=nf (Requires a facebook profile but seems everyone has one these days). The group was created by Joel Pobar.

Why is the introduction of Erlang style message passing into F# interesting? Well you may have never heard of Erlang but if you’ve ever used a cell phone you’ve probably used an Erlang system. Erlang was originally built by Ericsson and released as open source in 1998, it was built to support the highly distributed and fault-tolerant systems required to support mobile phone networks. Many people consider Erlang to be the language that gets concurrency right. So if you want to do concurrency why not just use Erlang? Well the fact that Erlang is built on its own custom runtime means...

Somasegar, the head of the Developer Division at Microsoft, has announced the productization of F#. Read more about it here.

As Don Syme points out in his piece on asynchronous workflows, they are not about getting the whole of concurrency right but rather about getting asynchronous I/O.  I think that to fully appreciate the beauty of asynchronous workflows one must understand the ugliness of what it’s like to do asynchronous I/O without them. I think this may be true for many areas of software development,  hell even good old C looks great if you’ve been forced to spend some time assembler, and I guess Joel and his law of “leaky abstractions” is saying something along a similar lines. So I...