But why should I learn F#?

I'm glad you asked! With multiple languages targeting the CLR it can seem just to be a matter of preference. Do you like curly braces, or significant white space?

But it soon becomes apparent there's a bit more to it than that; at first you spot pattern matching and discriminated unions. And then you start noticing a bunch of other things which look cool… but it's not quite so obvious how to use them or what to do with them. Last year I was able to give a lightning talk at F# Exchange on some of these language features and the response was positive enough that I'm back at F# Exchange 2017 to give the full version.

So: whether it's active patterns, computational expressions, type providers or quotations I'll be running through practical examples of how these features can be used, and how to get started creating your own examples.

And apart from being hyped to give my own talk, it's going to be great to meet up with the F# community again and meet some new faces. The opportunity to meet in person people I've exchanged ideas with online (hi Marcus Griep, Dave Thomas, …!) is invaluable. And even for someone who's been around F# for a while like me, there's always new things going on; Puritas looks fascinating.

Looking forward to meeting a bunch of you there, and you should start seeing a bit more appearing on this blog again after the conference. The last year has been pretty intense, but I'm hoping to make some announcements of interest to the F# community over the next couple of months.

Is this where I'm supposed to say "watch this space"?