F# for Scientists

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION

For the first time in history, and thanks to the exponential growth rate of computing power, an increasing number of scientists are finding that more time is spent creating, rather than executing, working programs. Indeed, much effort is spent writing small programs to automate otherwise tedious forms of analysis. In the future, this imbalance will doubtless be addressed by the adoption and teaching of more efficient programming techniques. An important step in this direction is the use of higher-level programming languages, such as F#, in place of more conventional languages for scientific programming such as Fortran, C, C++ and even Java and C#.

In this chapter, we shall begin by laying down some guidelines for good programming which are applicable in any language before briefly reviewing the history of the F# language and outlining some of the features of the language which enforce some of these guidelines and other features which allow the remaining guidelines to be met. As we shall see, these aspects of the design of F# greatly improve reliability and development speed. Coupled with the fact that a freely available, efficient compiler already exists for this language, no wonder F# is already being adopted by scientists of all disciplines.

PROGRAMMING GUIDELINES

Some generic guidelines can be productively adhered to when programming in any language:

Correctness over performance

Programs should be written correctly first and optimized last.

Factor programs