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Well, not a lot of F# hacking got done last month. I did download the then-current F# build, and tried out some of the FLinq samples, and they didn’t work. I posted about it on the F# mailing list (Microsoft, your mailing list server needs some serious kicks in the pants region), and there was no helpfulness forthcoming. So, onto the (cold, dark) back burner it went.

Which was fine, because ordinary life (summer vacation for the kids, my birthday, etc.) was plenty busy. And my work has exploded into a drinking-from-the-firehose geek frenzy — I wrote a monadic push parser the other day, and got paid for it. Not clear whether it’ll ever ship, but it was definitely relevant, which rocks. I can now say that I have lost my monadic virginity. Whether I should say it is another question. (My wife says not….)

However, on the bright side, the F# team did ship their CTP (Community Tech Preview, or something like that, for those outside the MAZ (Microsoft Acronym Zone)). So I’ll take another run at it later this month. One cool thing is they have support for dimensional quantities now, a la Fortress. Only F# is basically here now, and usable for production software, whereas Fortress is still N years away from having any kind of realistic compiler. So IN YOUR FACE, Guy Steele! (Seriously, Fortress looks great. It’s just that F# is here now, and is pretty great itself.)

OK, time to get back to watching a truly monster build crunch away. Work is creeping out of normal working hours — getting assigned a fairly major team-wide task tends to have that effect. It’s also cutting into my discretionary hacking and gaming time considerably. We’ll see what the next month holds….