Try F#

Established: September 24, 2012

Thank you to everyone who used and contributed to Try F#, an online coding website launched in 2012. The site is no longer supported and has been redirected to this research page. Additional F# resources include F#-based web experiences such as Azure Notebooks (opens in new tab), Fable (opens in new tab), and .NET Server-side programming (opens in new tab); and online F# code execution is available via sites such as Fable REPL (opens in new tab), repl.it (opens in new tab), JDoodle (opens in new tab), and .NET Fiddle (opens in new tab). Additional resources are available at F# Software Foundation (opens in new tab) and Microsoft .NET for F# page (opens in new tab). For more information on the research contributions of this site, see the publication Browser-Based Software for Technology Transfer (opens in new tab).

Try F# Background

Try F# demonstrates the power of F# to solve real-world analytical programming and information-rich problems by providing a web experience to help you learn the F# language, create programs, and share information—quickly and easily.

A growing trend in both the theory and practice of programming is the interaction with rich information spaces. This trend derives from the ever-increasing need to integrate programming with large, heterogeneous, connected, richly structured, streaming, evolving, or probabilistic information sources—be they databases, web services, or large‐scale, cloud‐based data analyses.

However, as the complexity of programs and information structures increases, the coupling between the two is far from seamless, requiring many manual programming and modeling efforts. These manual processes often lead to brittle programs and thwart the easy application of novel compiler technologies and information mastering methods.

Providing strongly typed access to rich data sources is a key consideration for strongly-typed programming languages, to insure low impedance mismatch in information access.

F# 3.0 (opens in new tab) addresses these issues, making it ideal for analytical, data-rich, and parallel-component development, harnessing the power of functional programming while bringing the web of data to your fingertips through type providers.

And Try F# makes it even easier to program in F# 3.0 with an easy to learn, simple to use, and straightforward way of sharing, all through the browser.