I’ll in London on the 10th/11th May giving a two day course entitle “Beginning F# Workshop” in conjunction with the lovely folks at Skills Matter. I think I give a fairly good description of the course on the workshop webpage, so I wanted to use this blog post to talk about why you would want to attend. I believe, as I stated in my book, that functional programming will be the next big wave in programming, and that F# will be one of the languages at the forefront of this functional programming renaissance. I don’t believe this will be sole driven by the move from one core processors to many core processors and the move towards parallel programming that this will create, though this will undoubtedly help. I believe functional programming is will be the next big wave in programming as functional languages provide better ways of raising the level of abstraction than procedural and object oriented programming languages do. Sadek Drobi has a nice talk on computation abstraction in he explains some of these new types of abstraction that functional programming languages offer. With the kind of systems we are building today, we are now ready to start working at these new levels of abstraction.
While I don’t believe functional programming to be any harder than object oriented programming or procedural programming, I do believe it takes a bit of a mind shift to get to know the functional programming style. This course will offer a nice gentle introduction to how to use functional programming techniques in F# and how to mix these with the object oriented and imperative styles were necessary. So whether or not you’re planning to use F# or not (although of course, I think you should be), I think this course will give you a new and interesting perspective on programming.
I’m also very happy to announce that I’ll be running a workshop on F# at progressive.net, its taking place in London on 12th -14th May. It’s a real pleasure to be able to be involved with an event that has speaks like David Laribee, Oren Eini (a.k.a. Ayende Rahien), Hamilton Verissimo de Oliveira, Sebastien Lambla, and Mike Hadlow. For those of you who made it last year, (or have seen the podcast) the workshop will be along similar lines except I’ll be trying to make it much more interactive. Instead of just following along, as I present the concepts I’ll be adding a series of hands on labs to help get participants solving problems in F# for themselves. In many respects the tutorial I’m giving will be a cut down version of the tutorial I’m giving beforehand (but if you planning to attend both you can always go and see Seb’s session on RESTful architectures). If you’re in any doubt whether you should attend you should probably read this blog post by Dylan Beattie. Book before tomorrow (March 21st) and you'll save nearly 50%!