Which companies are using F# internally and what are they using it for?

Question

I am interested in learning F# and would like to know if it is worth pursuing professionally. Are there any companies out there who are using this language and what are they using it for.

Answer 1

According to a few sites

• Microsoft (but of course :) )
• Morgan Stanley
• Credit Suisse
• UBS

Likely many more as this article is a bit old.

Source:

• http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/free/introduction.html

Answer 2

At this point in time you aren't going to find a lot of adopters. It's a little early. When 2k10 comes out it will increase. It's just like any other technology, there are a lot of companies that are going to start using it, or at least try, but they don't want to be the first. There is not drawback in learning it, and if you do, you probably won't have that much competition as far as people who know it in the short term.

Answer 3

At Credit Suisse, we've been using it to develop quantitative models for financial products for about 18 months now.

Answer 4

It's definitely worth pursuing, because it gives you a whole insight into the world of functional programming (if you have not been previously exposed).

I would say that it is good to be on the leading edge in this case. Frameworks come and go: the advantage of F# is that it is based on a framework that is likely not going away for a long time. And as it will be bundled with VS2010, lots more people are going to start taking an interest. Personally I think time spent with F# is an excellent investment in the future, when companies are going to be looking for 'experienced F# developers'...

Note also that F# is very useful for prototyping, analysing data; lots of things that are likely to be used internally within a company whilst not necessarily ending up in a public-facing product. In these cases the fact that companies are using it is likely to be less well publicised.

Note: There are lots of more or less related questions here on SO (when searching, use [F#] keyword).

Answer 5

i'd imagine that the majority of what you see today is math/physics/finance oriented, but that's going to change. i find myself cringing at c# code nowadays, and i'm sure i'm not the only one.

i'm using it at my current company (can't disclose the name, but fortune 500 health care), and using it for web development.

Answer 6

Functional programming is best suited for algorithms over big data or computationally intensive work. For example, financial analysis (wall street), health, insurance, advertising analysis, image/digital processing, game development and SQL data mining. Functional programming also works will in defining Domain Specific Languages (DSLs.) Companies which fall into these categories could be using F#.

Answer 7

You've probably never heard of our company, but we write trucking / logistics software. We are using it as a part of a greater, largely C#, project for its Lex/Yacc functionality to help with interpreting a proprietary language in a rules engine, as well as pattern matching for the rules themselves.

It works very well for both these tasks.