TL;DR After a marathon production process I have finally released a new screencast, “F# Fundamentals“ for Pluralsight.

2015 was a big year for functional programming (FP), with many high-profile successes.

• Facebook implemented its anti-spam system using Haskell, and its flow and hack compilers using OCaml.
• There were a number of highly subscribed FP MOOCS.
• Jane Street continued to build a successful trading business on OCaml
• There was a pronounced shift towards FP style in JavaScript tooling such as Elm, React, RxJS, Immutable.js and Angular2.
• The big data ecosystem moved towards scala as a de-facto standard.

Developers are discovering that FP helps them to be clearer and more rigorous in their programming. A maturing industry is discovering a set of more capable tools.

Is it time to learn functional programming?

Probably.

Either you will discover a whole new level of programming skill and productivity, or you will learn why it is not for you. Surely either option is better than ignorance?

Is it time to learn F#?

Yes. If you work with .NET then F# should be one tool in your toolbox.

The biggest uptake of functional programming has been in the tools that are able to benefit from a larger ecosystem. Scala and Clojure have benefitted from targeting the JVM. This allows them to be used anywhere Java is expected, to run on the JVM and to access the Java standard library. In the .NET world F# is the equivalent. It is a functional programming language that runs on the .NET CLR and has access to the .NET base class library.

Still not sure? Have a look at this excellent article describing the benefits of F# and functional programming.

How?

Try F# lets you experiment with F# programming in your browser. http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ has lots of great content.

Finally, I have recorded a six hour screencast (F# Fundamentals) that takes the student from no knowledge of F# to a intermediate level sufficient for creating console applications, services and web applications.