These pages document F#'s origins as a research project at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. You can find out all about the latest happenings with F# at the MSDN F# Developer Center.

Some F# community links:

• The primary gathering point of the F# community tends to be hubFS, the community site created by Chris Barwick. We recommend you subscribe to an email or RSS feed for the forums and blog posts there.

• The RSS feed Planet F# is great way to keep track of a lot of what's going on with F# around the world.

• Don Syme's F# Blog and his Home Page.

Note: these links are getting a little out of date as the F# community grows!

From 2003-2007, F# was developed and maintained at Microsoft Research by Don Syme and James Margetson, with help from others. It is now developed by the whole F# team including Don, James, Luke Hoban, Jomo Fisher, Brian McNamara, Chris Smith, Dmitry Lomov, Anar Alimov, Joe Pamer and Matteo Taveggia. Contributors have included Santosh Zachariah, Laurent le Brun, Can Erten, Greg Neverov and Tomas Petricek who all interned with the F# team at Microsoft Research and helped with language design issues and implementation. Shobana Balakrishnan has helped with program management. The MSR Applied Games Group (now the Online Services and Advertising Group) has been instrumental in proving the worth of F# in data-mining related to online services, and F# would not be the same without the incredible enrgies of Ralf Herbrich. Some other contributors and advisors at MSR Cambridge have been Byron Cook, Cedric Fournet and Georges Gonthier.

The F# team are especially grateful to members of other language communities who have been willing to give us advice about F# and to help us talk through aspects of the design. This includes Anders Hejlsberg, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, Phil Wadler, Mads Torgersen and Martin Odersky. We're also grateful for the support of colleagues in the Microsoft Research Programming Principles and Tools group.

F# would not exist without the incredible work of the Microsoft Developer Division, especially the .NET Common Language Runtime team, the .NET Framework team, the C# team and the Visual Studio team. Particular thanks to Raj Pai, Scott Wiltamuth, Craig Symonds, John Montgomery and S. Somasegar for their support and encouragement.

We have special memories of James Huddleston of Apress who took a lead in publishing activities related to F#, which has lead to Foundations of F# and Expert F#. James passed away in early 2007. Dominic Cooney was an enthusiastic early adopter, played a significant role in the design of the F# object system, and is an active F# user. Robert Pickering was one of the earliest external F# adopters, and now has his own F# website and the F# Wiki.

Byron Cook and Josh Berdine do the incredible Terminator project in a combination of F# and OCaml. Karthik Bhargavan and Andy Gordon are regular users, and Jakob Lichtenberg, Tom Ball and Vlad Levin are supportive users in the context of Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier and related research projects.

Stephen Tse cross-compiles the fjavac idealized/formalized Java compiler using both OCaml and F#, and is one of the lead users of F# on Linux/Mono. Daniel Margolis has now also done the same on MacOS/Mono.

Satnam Singh, David Langworthy and Dave Wecker have been enthusiastic early adopters at Microsoft, as have Lars Nilsson, Artem Prysyazhnuk, Julian Laugel, SooHyoung Oh, optionsScalper, Dru Sellers, Martin Churchill and Adam Granicz externally, some of whom are now driving fantastic F# community initiatives of their own (which you'll no doubt hear more of soon!). Mathieu Verbaere, Ran Ettinger and Oege de Moor at Oxford University are using F# on a number of projects, including JunGL. Anil Madhavapeddy is one of number of ML advocates who are looking at having both OCaml and F# as tools in their programming arsenal. Jack Palevich first took the dive into combining F# with DirectX, leading to many good things in the development of F#.

Damien Watkins, Martin Szummer and Gavin Bierman are regular co-conspirators in F#-related matters and have given talks and demonstrations on F# at several events. Tom Minka has been a useful colleague (though still programs mostly in C# :-)). The work of John Winn, Tom Melham and Jim Grundy helped inspire and contribute to the design of F# quotations.

If you'd like to get involved with F#, please get in touch with the F# team, follow the links to the F# Wiki and elsewhere or contact some of the people in the F# community listed above. Enjoy!

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