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F# was so easy to pick up we went from complete novices to having our code in production in less than a week.Jack MottO’Connor’s OnlineCase studyAs an experiment to evaluate functional programming as a production tool we developed a new multi level caching system for our website in F#. Because F# can use existing C# libaries so easily we were able to proceed rapidly using popular packages such as StackExchange.Redis and ProtoBuf-Net. In less than a week we had a flexible caching system in production, complete with an administration page and performance statistics tracking.We also found that it was straightforward to use our new F# module from within our existing C# code, and that the F# code deployed to and ran as an Azure app service without any special configuration. Adding F# to the code base was completely painless.The developers on our team are all intrigued by F# and eager to learn more. As well, we find that at college recruiting events, prospective students are very excited to hear that we are using a functional language in productionThe F# code is consistently shorter, easier to read, easier to refactor and contains far fewer bugs. As our data analysis tools have developed … we’ve become more productive.KagglepermalinkAt Kaggle we initially chose F# for our core data analysis algorithms because of its expressiveness. We’ve been so happy with the choice that we’ve found ourselves moving more and more of our application out of C# and into F#. The F# code is consistently shorter, easier to read, easier to refactor, and, because of the strong typing, contains far fewer bugs.As our data analysis tools have developed, we’ve seen domain-specific constructs emerge very naturally; as our codebase gets larger, we become more productive.The fact that F# targets the CLR was also critical - even though we have a large existing code base in C#, getting started with F# was an easy decision because we knew we could use new modules right away.The use of F# demonstrates a sweet spot for the language within enterprise softwareSimon CousinspermalinkI have written an application to balance the national power generation schedule for a portfolio of power stations to a trading position for an energy company. The client and server components were in C# but the calculation engine was written in F#.The use of F# to address the complexity at the heart of this application clearly demonstrates a sweet spot for the language within enterprise software, namely algorithmically complex analysis of large data sets. My experience has been a very positive one.At Credit Suisse, we’ve been using F# to develop quantitative models for financial productsHoward MansellCredit Suisse (at time of writing)source: CUFP Workshop, 2008, permalinkBuilding valuation models for derivative trades requires rapid development of mathematical models, made possible by composition of lower-level model components. We have found that F#, with the associated toolset, provides a unique combination of features that make it very well suited to this kind of development. In this talk, I will explain how we are using F# and show why it is a good match. I will also talk about the problems we have had, and outline future enhancements that would benefit this kind of work.The abstract to a talk at the Commercial Users of Functional Programming workshopThe performance is phenomenal. We can now re-calculate the entire bank portfolio from scratch in less than a second and the response-time for single deal verification calculation is far below 100 milliseconds.Jan Erik Ekelof, http://M.Sc.Head IT-architect and lead developer Counterparty RiskHandelsbankenpermalinkI first evaluated F# back in 2006 - 2007 for the purpose of math oriented high performance applications within Financial Risk. I got in spring 2009 a mission to implement a new Real-time Counter-party Risk system covering all possible present and future deal types within the entire bank. The effort was started with only three resources, me as architect and lead developer and two colleagues – one risk expert and one high performing developer. Our first intention was to use C#, but I did a quick proof-of-concept with F# implementing a low level TCP/IP-communication to an existing risk-system. This showed us and our management that F# could give us a real productivity boost due to its support for multiple paradigms and functional concepts together with an impressive support for multi-threading.Our first delivery is approaching rapidly and F# has proved itself as a real life-saver. We started off using C# in many places but have since then moved almost entirely into F# due to its ability to reduce the amount of code required and its simplicity when developing massive parallel computations. The performance is phenomenal. We can now re-calculate the entire bank portfolio from scratch in less than a second and the response-time for single deal verification calculation is far below 100 milliseconds(the original demand was 200 milliseconds to make the application usable for electronic markets). Although some gains are to be attributed to how we have built our calculation models, F# made it possible for us to implement our algorithms and techniques with very little code and with a huge similarity to the original mathematical models and regulations (which is important for verification of correctness). We have also been able to use the support for Async-workflows producing code that is simple and clear and easy to understand but still runs in parallel when required.The present application contains 35 to 40.000 lines of F#-code and an equal amount of C#-code. However, our estimate is that the F# code contains at least 80% of the functionality (which is pretty amazing!). Our experience shows us that the number of code lines shrinks with a ratio of 1/2 to 1/4 by just porting functionality from C# to F# (not counting single character or empty lines in the C#-code). We have by remodeling increased the ratio to the area of 1/5 to 1/8, where the remodeling involves replacing object oriented constructs with functional ones (and actually removing mutable states). One example from last week was a limit-utilization module written in F# but using an object-oriented approach containing +300 lines of code. I rewrote it to below 70 lines of code just by shifting paradigm (and the rewrite made it much easier to understand and verify)!The benefits of functional programming in F# have given us a great advantage over our slow moving competitors.Bayard RockpermalinkAt Bayard Rock we work hard every day in the pursuit of new approaches towards anti-money-laundering. Before adopting F# there were often months of turnaround time between development of an idea and actually testing it on real data in our production environment. F#’s succinctness and composability allows us to rapidly iterate on ideas while the type system acts as a safety net. On top of this, it has the advantage of being a first class member of the .NET ecosystem and so integrates seamlessly with our Microsoft stack systems. This means that instead of months we can often see our ideas come to life in just days.The benefits of functional programming in F# have given us a great advantage over our slow moving competitors. After three years of using F# our products have consistently gotten significantly better each year without sacrificing stability. Our clients often are amazed by how we can quickly adapt to unique challenges and how we can find the bad guys hiding in their data much more effectively than anyone else. Little do they know that it’s largely thanks to our secret weapon, F#.Grange Insurance parallelized its rating engine to take better advantage of multicore server hardwareGrange InsurancepermalinkFor nearly 75 years, Grange Insurance has offered competitive products and services to policyholders in more than a dozen U.S. states. To maintain its well-earned reputation and standing, the company decided to enhance its rating engine—a software tool for rating policies and performing what-if modeling, impact analyses, and other vital activities. Working with the Sophic Group and using the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System development environment and F# programming language, Grange Insurance parallelized its rating engine to take better advantage of multicore server hardware, and in so doing garnered significant performance benefits. Processes that used to require hours now take just minutes, enabling the company to trim time-to-market by weeks and making it far easier for independent agents to sell and service Grange products.Large insurance company developed an entire pension quote calculator entirely in F# in under 100 days with no prior F# experience at all…Large insurance companysource 1, source 2,permalinkOne of the world’s largest insurance companies have F# code in production, are starting several more projects in F#. We are currently consulting for this company (£2.5bn profit) who have migrated some of their number crunching and business logic to F# and are so happy with the results (10x faster and 10x less code vs their Visual C++ 6) that they are proposing to migrate 1,600,000 lines of code to F#. In particular, their developers found F# easy to learn and use.… my predecessor developed an entire pension quote calculator (typically scheduled to take 300-400 man days) entirely in F# in under 100 days with no prior F# experience at all. Performance is 10× better than the C++ that it replaces because the new code avoids unnecessary copying and exploits multicore parallelism. Part of my job here will be to give basic F# training to around 20 people and bring a few people up to expert level.In answer to “Can you give any evidence for 10x performance gain over C++?”. The insurer’s C++ code is a simple manual translation from very inefficient Mathematica code that suffers from several pathological performance problems mainly centered around excessive copying. The F# rewrite does not have these problem. The 10x performance gain was verified by the client.Our risk and analytic capabilities (…) are entirely written in F#Lawrence AustenChief Risk Officer at Trafigurasource, permalink…work directly with Trafigura’s Chief Risk Officer/Head of Quantitative Analysis, cranking code and rapidly extending our risk and analytic capabilities, which are entirely written in F#.Trafigura Limited engages in the supply and offtake of crude oil, petroleum products, liquefied petroleum gas, metals, and metal ores and concentrates worldwide. Its solutions include trading, financing, hedging, and logistical support….The F# solution offers us an order of magnitude increase in productivty…GameSysYan CuiLead Server Engineersource, permalinkF# is becoming an increasingly important part of our server side infrastructure that supports our mobile and web-based social games with millions of active users. F# first came to prominence in our technology stack in the implementation of the rules engine for our social slots games which by now serve over 700,000 unique players and150,000,000 requests per day at peaks of several thousand requests per second. The F# solution offers us an order of magnitude increase in productivity and allows one developer to perform the work that are performed by a team of dedicated developers on an existing Java-based solution, and is critical in supporting our agile approach and bi-weekly release cycles.The agent-based programming model offered by F#’s MailboxProcessor allows us to build thread-safe components with high-concurrency requirements effortlessly, without using locks and sacrificing maintainability and complexity. These agent-based solutions also offer much improved efficiency and latency whilst running at scale. Indeed our agent-based stateful server for ourMMORPG has proved a big success and great cost saver that we’re in the process of rolling it out across all of our social games!Using F# for cross-platform mobile development (Android, iOS) saves development timeJames MooreSenior Software DeveloperDigium, IncpermalinkWe wanted to develop our Android and iOS applications using as much shared code as possible. We built a reactive architecture using F# actors (aka mailbox processors) to build a very robust multithreaded system that was easily portable between Android and iOS.Our F# actors (shared across iOS and Android) expose .Net IObservables that are consumed by UI systems written for the native platforms. Dividing the system in that way allowed for testable multithreaded code that would have been difficult to write in other .Net languages.For a machine learning scientist, speed of experimentation is the critical factor to optimize.Patrice SimardDistinguished EngineerMicrosoftpermalinkI wrote the first prototype of the click prediction system deployed in Microsoft AdCenter in F# in a few days.For a machine learning scientist, speed of experimentation is the critical factor to optimize. Compiling is fast but loading large amounts of data in memory takes a long time. With F#’s REPL, you only need to load the data once and you can then code and explore in the interactive environment. Unlike C# and C++, F# was designed for this mode of interaction. It has the ease of use of Matlab or Python, both of which I have used extensively in the past. One problem with Matlab and Python is that they are not strongly typed. No compile-time type checking hurts speed of experimentation because of bugs, lack of reusability, high cost of refactoring, no intellisense, and slow execution. Switching to F# was liberating and exhilarating. 2 caveats: Not every problem fits that model. With a bit of discipline, such as avoiding massive parallelism for as long as possible, the model goes a long way. The second caveat is that the cost of learning F# is steep. For me, it was 2 weeks of decreased productivity. It has proven a worthwhile investment.As a machine learning practitioner programming in F#, I constantly switch between two activities: 1) writing prototype code (highly interactive ugly code with throw away results, functions, and visualizations) and 2) upgrading prototype code to library standard (fast, generic, reusable). When I go back to writing prototypes, I build on top of the newly upgraded functions. In F#, the cost of switching between these two modes is minimal: often nothing needs to be done other than adding comments and deleting deprecated functions.This means that most of the time is dedicated to experimenting and the majority of the code is close to shipping quality. Some people can do this in C# or Matlab, but I find that F# excels at it.I started F# with deep suspicions regarding efficiency. My first test was to link F# with C++/CLI and check performance of calling SSE/AVX optimized code. As hoped, F# is comparable to C# when it comes to speed. You have the same flexibility to link with well optimized code. The inline generics are truly magical: same IL in the linked DLLs, but the functions expand to specialized fast code when you instantiate them. Compromises between intuitive code and efficient code still need to be made. I found that “for” loop, “tail recursive” loop, or Parallel.For with ThreadLocal loops, are faster than a succession of piped IEnumerables (seq in F#). F# does not hamper one’s ability to write ugly fast code. Rest assured.Several people in the machine learning group in Microsoft Research have switched to F# for the reasons above. The world is slowly moving toward functional programming with good justifications: the code is cleaner and easier to debug in a distributed environment. Among the available functional languages, F# is a compelling option.We see great potential for F# to be used as a scripting language in CAD; it fits very well for computational design challenges in the construction industry.Goswin RothenthalDesign EngineerWaagner BiropermalinkIn recent years many Architects have discovered that they can greatly enlarge their design repertoire by the use of parametric design, programming or scripting. Architects can now quickly and easily explore new geometries previously unseen in Architecture. Besides being designed in a novel way these geometries can also be exactly represented and reasoned about in terms of structural feasibility and manufacturing constraints. These facts take new geometries out of the dreams of Architects and make them real candidates for construction.One such project is the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel. Waagner-Biro was awarded the construction contract for the Dome. For the cladding of this dome more than 450´000 individual cutting and drilling patterns of custom aluminium extrusions had to be described and automated. The sheer scale and complexity of the cladding on the dome required us to re-evaluate our parametric design approach. I developed an F# application to represent and organize all cladding elements of the dome. It includes a small geometry kernel and an adapted version of the Half Edge Data Structure to efficiently query the neighbourhood of each element. I used Rhino and its .NET API to host the F# DLL for drawing and visualisation. This application enabled us to have an integrated workflow from the main geometry setout all the way down to the manufacturing data in a single parametric model. This project was the first use of F# at Waagner-Biro for a large scale project. The switch to F# from dynamic scripting languages helped to reduce development time and execution time. The strongly typed environment, algebraic data types and immutable data helped to avoid a whole range of bugs and fits well the domain of generating static 3d geometry. I see great potential for F# to be used as scripting languages in CAD, especially since most big CAD packages already offer a .NET API.(Image credits: Jean Nouvel Architects)The results speak for themselves.Matt BallLiz Earle Beauty Co. LtdpermalinkAs a business we actively seek improvement every single day. This is the same for our IT systems, so we have been searching for a means to do that in our in-house software systems.The F# type system has allowed us to do this - by eliminating null references, increasing type safety and creating rich domain models that help us express hard-and-fast business rules in a way that we can really lean on the compiler; while actually reducing our total lines of code (and noise!). Doing so has reduced both our requirement for expensive bug hunts in our production systems, and the overall cost of maintaining unnecessary code complexity.We have been evaluating F# for a year now, and have components in our production systems that have been bug-free since deployment. The results speak for themselves.…we have decided to use F# as our functional language to have automatic integration with rest of the system…EMEA-based Security Solutions CompanypermalinkWe develop security product to protect critical infrastructure (e.g. Oil Refinery, Airport, etc) for countries across the globe…. In core of our product there are prediction algorithms. We use different modeling and theorems (Monte Carlo, Action, etc) to implement the prediction components. … Since we are rewriting our next generation product using .NET, we have decided to use F# as functional language to have automatic integration with rest of the system. … We also have advanced machine learning components (Artificial Intelligence) and functional languages are the best fit to write AI stuff. We are planning to use F# as the primary programming language in this area because of its interoperability with .NET.With its new tools, the bank can speed development by 50 percent or more, improve quality, and reduce costs.Large Financial Services Firm, Europesource, permalinkA large financial services firm in Europe sought new development tools that could cut costs, boost productivity, and improve the quality of its mathematical models. To address its needs, the bank deployed F#, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio. It will soon upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and then integrated F#. With its new tools, the bank can speed development by 50 percent or more, improve quality, and reduce costs.F# encourages Reason Driven Development that leads to virtually bug-free codeBoston-based Financial Services Firm, Fixed IncomepermalinkWe are using F# because it considerably increases speed of software development which is crucial for a small company with limited development resources. The most enjoyable feature of this language is that the developer can reason about the code instead of relying only on unit tests. I would say the language encourages Reason Driven Development methodology which leads to virtually bug-free code. F# as strongly typed functional language ideally fits for tasks our software solves – Fixed Income securities trading optimization. It is also very important that F# computation engine could be seamlessly integrated with other parts of .NET-based software product.At a major Investment Bank, we used F# to build an Early Warning Indicator System for Liquidity RiskStephen ChannellCepheis LtdpermalinkEarly Warning Indicators is a standalone dashboard application to monitor real-time market movements and highlight potential risk for further analysis. EWI subscribed to real-time equity, Forex and commodity prices and needed to calculate Red/Amber/Green status in real-time for tolerance breaches and to generate dashboard reports as needed.The business wanted the flexibility to define formulas using Excel expressions, but spreadsheet components could not cope with the data-rate without conflation and management didn’t want a solution that relied on an Excel template and IT change control to add new indicators.F# was chosen for development productivity, performance of a cell framework implemented using computation expressions; ease with which Excel expressions could be parsed as a DSL and .NET integration with QALib, Market and timer-series data.Post implementation review highlighted that (given resource and time constraints) functionality would have been sacrificed without F# and its associated tooling.I keep being surprised by how compact and readable F# is…London-Based Asset Management CompanypermalinkWe have set up a complete risk management system that combines several data sources, presents them in a … WPF user interface, and does a LOT of calculation behind the scenes. When the calculation requires a proper algorithm (i.e. anything that is more complex than a simple for loop), our choice has been F#. I have to say I keep being surprised by how compact it is and, nonetheless, how readable it is even when I’m reading code that I hadn’t looked at or thought about for six months.The efficient use of functional programming throughout the R&D cycle helped make the cycle faster and more efficient.Moody Hadi (CME Group)permalinkThe credit markets have varying pockets of liquidity. Market participants would like to understand how the liquidity of their set of entities changes relative to the overall market. A liquidity scoring model is needed to provide these metrics across the entire CDS universe. Functional programming and specifically F# was used in order to provide the market with a fast and accurate solution. … The research and development cycle was made faster and more efficient by the effective use of functional programming.The efficient use of functional programming throughout the R&D cycle helped make the cycle faster and more efficient. Less time was spent on translating requirements, miscommunications etc and more on producing a fast and accurate solution quickly.Since programmers can understand your quant code they can focus on their core competency – developing fast and reliable production code. The development exercise becomes catered towards optimization, performance tuning and error handling (i.e. making the code reliable) Functionality is not lost from the prototype due to miscommunication or rather crude documentation/requirements, which saves time in testing. Mass regression testing is easy with precise precision level differences between the prototype and the production system.F# allows you to move smoothly in your programming styleJulien Laugel, http://eurostocks.comsource, permalinkI’ve been coding in F# lately, for a production task. F# allows you to move smoothly in your programming style… I start with pure functional code, shift slightly towards an object-oriented style, and in production code, I sometimes have to do some imperative programming. I can start with a pure idea, and still finish my project with realistic code. You’re never disappointed in any phase of the project!I have now delivered three business critical projects written in F#. I am still waiting for the first bug to come in.UK-based Power CompanySimon CousinspermalinkI am both a C# dev and an F# dev. I can only offer subjective anecdotal evidence based on my experience of delivering projects in both languages (I am too busy delivering software to do anything else).That said, the one stat in the summary that I find most compelling is the defect rate. I have now delivered three business critical projects written in F#. I am still waiting for the first bug to come in. This is not the case with the C# projects I have delivered. I will continue to monitor and report on this. It might be that I am just on a lucky streak, but I suspect that the clarity and concision of F# code contributes greatly to its correctness.F# proved ideal for the complex data machinations required to build the models from raw Excel input.A Fortune 100 ManufacturerSupplied to FSSF,permalinkWe developed a ClickOnce F# / WPF application that scores and ranks thousands of models of part-supplier combinations using Microsoft Solver Foundation (MSF). Agents can chose from the highest scoring combinations to optimize purchasing decisions. F# proved ideal for the complex data machinations required to build the models from raw Excel input. Also, the MSF supplied F# functional wrapper is a great way of using Solver Foundation from F#.Type providers made working with external data sources simple and intuitive.Jon CanningProperty To RenovatepermalinkEvery day we analyze data for hundreds of thousand of properties, sourced from XML and JSON feeds. Features such as Options and Type Providers have given us incredibly concise, expressive, and testable code with which to handle them, freeing us to focus on business value.As a developer moving from C#, some of the concepts you read about functional programming can be difficult to grasp and the barrier to entry appears high. However, with just a basic understanding and a helpful and welcoming community, F# has proven to be very productive and has quickly become my language of choice.Around 95% of the code in these projects has been developed in F#Anton Schwaighofer,Microsoftbing Ads Ranking Allocation and Pricingsource, permalinkAround 95% of the code in these projects has been developed in F#. F# allowed for rapid development of prototypes, and thus also rapid verification or falsification of the underlying mathematical models. Complex algorithms, for example to compute Nash equilibria in game theory, can be expressed succinctly. Units of measure reduced the chance of errors dramatically: Prices, probabilities, derivatives, etc. can already be kept apart at compile time.F# is central to Microsoft’s quantum algorithm researchDave WeckerMicrosoft Advanced Strategies and ResearchpermalinkF# is central to Microsoft’s quantum algorithm research. The LIQUi|⟩ simulator (Language Integrated Quantum Operations) presents an extension of F# that presents a seamless integration of classical and quantum operations. The scale and efficiency of the simulator allows it to handle among the largest entangled systems of qubits (quantum bits) ever modeled utilizing a targeted linear algebra package written entirely in F#. In addition, the modular architecture allows users to easily extend the system in any desired research direction. The base library is well over 20,000 lines of code and implements a wide range of modules including circuits, molecular modeling, spin-glass systems, quantum error correction, machine learning, factoring and many others. The system runs in client, server and cloud environments. It is also designed to be used as an educational tool and we have found that bringing new users up to speed is a quick and painless process.F# is the night vision goggles I need when I go into the dark and attempt to solve previously unsolved problems.Professor Byron CookMicrosoft, permalinkI’m one of the first users of F#, since 2004. In my work (e.g. SLAM, Terminator, Zapato, T2, etc) I find that F# is the night vision goggles I need when I go into the dark and attempt to solve previously unsolved problems. Everything becomes simple and clear when expressed in F#.F# will continue to be our language of choice for scientific computing.Dr. Andrew PhillipsHead of Bio Computation GroupMicrosoft Research,permalinkI lead the Biological Computation group at Microsoft Research, where we are developing methods and software for modelling and analysis of biological systems. We have been using F# in our group for the past 7 years, and it’s the language of choice for all of our software development. In particular it forms the basis of our software for programming computational circuits made of DNA, for programming genetic devices that operate inside cells, and for programming complex biological processes in a modular way.The functional data structures and static type-checking that F# provides are ideally suited for developing these domain-specific languages, and the Visual Studio integration is superb for debugging and source control. The integration with .Net is seamless, and allows us to incorporate efficient numerical and visualisation libraries written in C#. It also allows us to take advantage of the full suite of .Net UI components.Our languages are specified with a formal syntax and semantics, which are rigorously analysed prior to their implementation. Programming in a functional language like F# brings the implementation much closer to the formal specification, which is important for ensuring accurate simulation and probabilistic analysis. Correct implementation of the semantics is critical, since even small coding errors can give rise to divergent predictions, which can in turn compromise biological experiments. F# is a great language for writing clean, concise code, which is statically typed within a professional development environment that supports a wealth of libraries. It will continue to be our language of choice for scientific computing.In our engineering group at Microsoft we use F# for several projectsMicrosoft Engineering TeampermalinkIn our internal engineering group at Microsoft, F# is used for several important tools: * analyzing feedback on the web to look for compatibility-related issues, * a static code analyzer to detect compatibility regressions in a product, * a delta-debugging tool to help root cause regression analysis in product builds.My team chose F# for its functional paradigm, maturity, and ease of interoperation with the .NET frameworkDylan HutchisonMicrosoft Research (intern), Stevens Institute of TechnologypermalinkWith an idea for a new domain specific language, my team chose F# for its functional paradigm, maturity, and ease of interoperation with the .NET framework. I wrote the language primitives in F#’s arsenal of data types (records, discriminated unions, a couple classes at the top level), implemented operations on the types using its hierarchy of modules, and turned our operations into a working demo in F# Interactive, all in about 10 days.I jumped for joy each time my code executed correctly on the first pass, and in the few cases it did not, debugging through Visual Studio felt natural and quick. As for .NET, integrating with Microsoft Excel was easy by importing the necessary DLLs, though Excel posed challenges beyond F#’s reach. Finally, I can verify that F# delivers a sense of correctness and safety, stronger than other languages I worked with in the past. It is reassuring to know your code will execute exactly as you intend.The simple, well-designed and powerful core of the language was perfect for introducing the fundamental concepts of functional programming.Michael R. HansenAssociate Professor, Technical University of DenmarkpermalinkProducing an F#-based book on functional programming has been a fantastic experience.Using this material in an F#-based courseintroducing the fundamental concepts of functional programming has been a delightful experience as well. The simple, well-designed, yet powerful, core of the language was perfect for that purpose and, to our surprise, the transition from using SML to using F# actually made the tooling easier for students no matter which platforms they used.Furthermore, F# with it rich runtime environment has proved to be an excellent programming platform in research applications and in a more advanced course aiming at showing the role of functional programming in a broad variety of applications ranging from computer science applications to more real-life applications. In the first version of this course, given together with Anh-Dung Phan, the students completed three projects in three weeks: One being an interpreter for a rich imperative programming language, another being implementation, application and analysis of a functional pearl, and the last being a curriculum planning system for studies at the Technical University of Denmark.Solving a number of programming problems using the language convinced me of the supreme qualities of F#Hans RischelFormer teacher of computer science at the Technical University of DenmarkpermalinkI was approached by my former colleague Michael (Michael R. Hansen) in autumn 2010 where he proposed that we should write a new textbook on functional programming - now using the F# programming language. To begin with I was quite sceptical about using a programming language appearing as part of a Microsoft program package. Solving a number of programming problems using the language convinced me, however, of the supreme qualities of F# - and we embarked on the project of getting acquainted with F# and writing the textbook.Michael and I spent considerable time solving traditional programming problems in F#. A combination of functional and imperative F# with an occasional pinch of OO gives a very pleasing platform for program development - once you have found your way through the wilderness of MSDN documentation (newcomers to the MSDN world may benefit from the MSDN library documentation found on the web-site of the book). All of Chapter 10 and part of Chapter 11 present program examples using this programming style.Computation expressions look esoteric to begin with, but they are actually rather useful. We spent much time trying to get this concept down to earth, with the purpose of making it accessible to simple-minded people like ourselves. The reader may judge how far we succeeded by studying Chapter 12 of the book.Writing this textbook with Michael has been an exciting experience.F#’s powerful type inference means less typing, more thinkingDon SymePrincipal Researcher, MicrosoftEclipse Summit Europe 2009, source, slide 49permalinkF# was used on Microsoft’s AdPredict project for adCenter. This was a 4 week project with 4 machine learning experts involving a model with 100million probabilistic variables and processing 6TB of training data in real-time. 2 weeks of CPU time were used during training. Benefits includedQuick Coding - F#’s powerful type inference means less typing, more thinking, Agile Coding - Type-inferred code is easily refactored, Scripting - “Hands-on” exploration, Performance - Immediate scaling to massive data sets, Memory-Faithful - Mega-data structures on 16GB machines,Succinctness - Live in the domain, not the language, Symbolic - Schema compilation and “Schedules” and .NET Integration - Especially Excel, SQL Server…The AI is implemented in F#…Microsoft, Path of Govideo source,permalinkPath of Go is powered by three technologies…: an AI capable of playing Go, the F# language, and TrueSkill to match online players. The AI is implemented in F# and meets the challenge of running efficiently in the .net compact framework on Xbox 360. This game places you in a number of visually stunning 3D scenes. It was fully developed in managed code using the XNA environment.…the core logic is written in F# wherever possible…Andrea D’IntinoYellow blue softpermalinkYellow blue soft is a truly international Micro-ISV: We are a small, dynamic and international team who is wondering why file-management is lagging 30 years behind and no one seems to care or even notice. We do. We love what we’re doing and most importantly we love listening to you! Visit our blog to know more about us and join our forum to become part of our sparkling community.The tabbles are special containers that you can use to categorize any kind of file and document as well as folders and bookmarks. Using Tabbles you can quickly categorize, find, sort and share your documents, in a totally new way.When F# is combined with Visual Studio… productivity goes through the roof!Prof Nigel HorspoolUniversity of Victoria, Canadasource, permalinkF# programs tend to be much shorter than their equivalents in other languages. The fewer lines of code required, of course, the higher the productivity. When F# is combined with Visual Studio, which provides help with remembering the methods attached to different data types and how to use those methods, productivity goes through the roof!…That’s the reason we have chosen F# for our undergraduate functional programming class…Prof. Peter SestoftIT University of CopenhagenpermalinkF# has a beautiful, simple but expressive language at its core, and many powerful features built around that core language. It can draw on all the power of the .NET libraries, and runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. That’s the reason we have chosen F# for our undergraduate functional programming class as well as our undergraduate programming language class (link)F#…levels the playing field between beginners and experienced programmers.Prof. Susan EisenbachImperial College, United Kingdomsource, permalinkFunctional languages are ideal for teaching clear thinking, for solving problems amenable to code solutions and it levels the playing field between beginners and experienced programmers. The first programming language taught has a substantial influence on what language students use when they have a free choice. F#, once it is platform independent, has the potential to become the first programming language.F#…made it trivial…Prof David WalkerPrinceton Universitysource, permalinkOur graduate course on Parallelism this Fall is full, even though it assumes no experience with functional programming or F#. The students are preparing the courseware themselves, and one of the topics we are studying is functional reactive programming (FRP) with continuous, time-varying behaviors. F#, with its rich graphics libraries, made it trivial to construct a super-fun assignment involving purely functional and interactive animation of a mock solar system.We recommend teaching F# because it is an extraordinary and flexible tool for teaching different areas of Computer ScienceAntonio CisterninoUniversity of Pisa, ItalypermalinkAt the University of Pisa we use F# for teaching UI programming, a fundamental course in the third year curriculum. In 2014 two more courses (Programming I & II) will use F# and Try F#.We use F# for teaching because it fits teaching both fundamentals and technology thanks to rich programming environment and libraries to access all system resources (such as UIs). Moreover, F# feels like a dynamic language thanks to F# interactive even if it is a statically typed language. Our students use F# on Windows, Mac and Linux. Try F# is a particularly valuable tool for teaching because it has a quite sophisticated editor with interactive evaluation and the ability of sharing saved files with students.I’ve also used F# for teaching programming for scientists at Scuola Normale Superiore, a PhD course at ITU Copenhagen and to graduate students in biomedical engineering.We recommend teaching F# because it is an extraordinary and flexible tool for teaching different areas of Computer Science. The language is rich and its functional nature allows to easily define the appropriate subset for teaching particular concepts. I use it to teach entire classes by typing code and evaluate interactively discussing the results of a single evaluation. It is also a great tool for teaching programming to scientists and engineers: I found that its mathematical roots in lambda calculus are more readily grasped by non-programmers, and interactive evaluation recalls environments such as Matlab and Mathematica very popular in these communities.F# is very popular among my students for the programming projectsSimão SousaUniversity of Beira Interior, PortugalpermalinkI teach and use OCaml and F# in my lectures (Theory of Computation, Formal Languages and Compiler Design, Formal Methods, Applied Cryptography), and F# is very popular among my students for the programming projects. Most of the students that are supervised by me (undergraduate, master but also PhD) use F# as the underlying programming language. This is even more the case now since part of our research directions includes working on cloud/distributed systems.F# and its programming environment leverage with no doubt the ability and the productivity of my students. This is, in my opinion, for two main reasons. First, F# allows the student, but also the researcher like me, to focus on the key aspects of his creation, while, secondly, enhancingtechnologically the work done in a so remarkable and facilitated way. Once drawn in paper and pencil, an algorithm is naturally implemented in F# and easily deployed in whatever is its execution context.I am definitively a strong believer of F# and amazed by the language and its community.I evaluated F# and it and found that for certain tasks it was better than C# in terms of performance while maintaining suitable readabilityAtalasoftsource, permalinkI evaluated F# and it and found that for certain tasks it was better than C# in terms of performance while maintaining suitable readability and for certain tasks, it leant itself better to certain algorithms (OctTree based color quantization stands out). …we were able to heavily leverage inline functions in F#……Since each of these are inlines, the F# optimizer can actually do something useful with the code. By using F#, we were able to address this cost by using inlining, code profiling, scanline caching, memoization and other techniques. In many cases we ended up with code that ran in equivalent time to C++ code or in some cases faster.We would recommend F# as an additional tool in the kit of any company building software on the .NET stack.Michael Newton, Senior Developer15below Ltd, permalinkHistorically, our code base has been written in a mix of C# and VB.NET Shop. F#’s excellent interoperability with the rest of .NET allows us to use it for components where it’s particular strength’s shine without having to discard or rewrite our existing code.Whether it’s driving the build and continuous integration system (due to scripting being a first class citizen in the F# world) or writing rock solid infrastructure components (due to the easy use of functional paradigms via features such as computational expressions, type inference and discriminated unions) we have found our F# code to be concise, easy to write and reliable to use. It is a perfect fit for many components within our messaging based architecture.We would recommend it as an additional tool in the kit of any company building software on the .NET stack.“Speed. I am speed.” works for F# like a charm.Sync.TodaypermalinkWe felt our C# Sync.Today 2013 started to become a huge monster with all the C# scripting, hooks etc. At the same time it was not really providing us with the flexibility we needed to fulfil our customers’ requirements. Instead of just another round of refactoring we decided to start moving to F# with Sync.Today 2015. Since both languages share the same common CLR, we did not throw everything away. We just started to simplify more and more because the F# code has much less lines (we had 146831x “{ or }”, 56555x “Blank”, 2770x “Null checks”, 56194x “Comments” and finally 223502 “Useful lines” and now we have 30602 lines with an order of magnitude more features and benefits ) Since we are processing a lot of information, but without complex computations etc., Orleans became the distributed computing library we build the solution on. It is using mixed C# + F# code now, which is perfect for us and allow us to run both on-premise and in Azure.Bohdan … shows F#’s use for performing aggregations over large datasets, taking advantage of cpu and io parallelismBohdan SzymanikpermalinkBohdan Szymanik, CTO at Kiwibank, is keen to show how he’s been using F# for analysis tasks within the bank. He’ll provide an intro to the language then show its use for performing aggregations over large datasets, taking advantage of cpu and io parallelism, and data presentation through charting and image generation.I am using F# to develop an API for data encryption using fully homomorphic encryption.Vitor PereirapermalinkI am currently using F# to develop my undergraduate final project. The project consists in developing an Application Programming Interface that allows one to encrypt data using fully homomorphic encryption and I found in F# the ideal programming language to develop it.Besides all the benefits of the functional paradigm for this type of work, F# interoperability with the .NET platform allows the construction of powerful implementations that other functional languages do not allow so easily.I really hope that, in the future, I keep working in Cryptography using F# as the main programming language for my projects. I am also preparing a hands-on presentation about F# and Cryptography to be presented at an event in Microsoft Portugal, which I will surely enjoy!I can tell you, F# really saved us a ton of effort.Giuseppe Maggiorepermalink, sourceI am the lead developer of Galaxy Wars, and I can tell you, F# really saved us a ton of effort. Monadic coroutines alone I believe are the reason why we manage to ship the thing on time…I am using F# to develop an API for data encryption using fully homomorphic encryption.namigop (Erik Araojo)permalink, sourceI’ve written two commercial apps in F#, WcfStorm.Rest and WcfStorm.Server.The UI part was in C# and the library part was in F#. In my experience it is fun language to code in.everyone gets really amazed when they try F# and experience its imense expressive powerMário PereiraMicrosoft Student Partner (MSP)Faculty of Sciences, University of OportopermalinkI have been a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) for three years, which offered me the opportunity to be in touch with most portuguese faculties and their students, getting the change to be a bit of an evangelist for Microsoft technologies. I chose to spent my MSP experience giving introductory seminars to F# and functional programming using F#. So far, I have given these presentations on most portuguese faculties and also at Microsoft portuguese headquarters. The result is always the same: everyone gets really amazed when they try F# and experience its imense expressive power, its delightful syntax and realize they can do functional programming (which is oftenly taken as something boring and complicated) on a familiar and confortable environment. Currently, along with a fellow portuguese MSP, (following the success of previous presentations and in response to the many requests for new sessions on F#) I’m preparing an hands-on session on the use of F# for Cryptography, to be presented on a future event at Microsoft Portugal.Personally, F# offers me a solid and trustable ground to develop reliable and complex applications on a confortable and succinct way, impossible to achieve with other languages and paradigms. With no doubt, I can say I’m a huge fan of F# and I’m always eager to get in touch with every new feature the language has to offer.…your code is less error-prone…Dariosource, permalinkYou can formulate many problems much easier, closer to their definition and more concise in a functional programming language like F# and your code is less error-prone (immutability, more powerful type system, intuitive recurive algorithms). You can code what you mean instead of what the computer wants you to say ;-) Furthermore you can have F# and C# together in one solution, so you can combine the benefits of both languages and use them where they’re needed.I’d recommend F#… learning another language is one way to become a better programmer.Antonio Hayleysource, permalinkI’d recommend F# to a die hard C# developer just because learning another language is one way a programmer can get out of a local maxima and become a better programmer. And F# isn’t just a different set of semantics on top of the same syntax as most imperative languages are, it’s a totally different programming style. All the more to expand the capabilities and understanding of a programmer.…We use F# in oceanographic research to connect multiple visualizations together in time and space…Rob Fatland, Microsoft ResearchpermalinkWe use F# in oceanographic research to connect multiple visualizations together in time and space, which is map-plane location and depth. We began by building our Narwhal Developers Library for Layerscape in C# with emphasis on visualizing flow lines and understanding drift experiment data. These data are quite complex, involving physical ocean state and measurement of microbial metabolic processes, consolidating remote sensing and passive drifters, and adding to all this current measurements with the tracks of autonomous robots. Our technical term for the visualization challenge is ‘horrible’.To cope with the horrible we began adding F# scripts; and this has been extremely productive, particularly in morphing ideas about data exploration into real tools quickly. Our most interesting achievement to date is to wire a chart into a 4D visual environment. The set-up is like this: The scientist sees two views of the data: First color coded structure in a curtain plot of time versus depth (chlorophyll coded as color for example), and second this same data time-boxed in the dynamic Worldwide Telescope (WWT) visualization engine. F# is used to wire them together: Left click (and drag) in the chart to scroll the WWT clock back and forth. Right-click + drag in the chart to select a subset of the data which is then used to construct a new (small) advection visualization. Because the selected pieces are small and chosen interactively we get around the horrible problem of seeing everything at once. It is like seeing an entire forest and making all but a few curious trees vanish. So F# has been a great way to make rapid progress, and fun to learn as well.…I have to say I love the language…Jared Parsonssource, permalinkOver the last 6 or so months, I’ve been working on a Vim emulation layer. This is the first major project I’ve ever done with F# and I have to say I love the language. In many ways I used this project as a method of learning F# (and this learning curve is very much evident if you look through the history of the project). What I find the most amazing about F# is just how concise of a language it is. The Vim engine comprises the bulk of the logic yet it only comprises 30% of the overall code base.There is a noticeable interest in the developer community in Russia towards F#.Dmitry SoshnikovAssociate Professor, Moscow Aviation Technical UniversitypermalinkI do some samples in F# for the lectures and the book, but all that is within a single-user VS 2010 Pro installation. Right now we have a set of slides on functional programming with F# in Russian in the curriculum repository, and the video-course of functional programming using F# available in the largest Russian Internet-University (Национальный Открытый Университет "ИНТУИТ"). The course is being taught in 2 universities. There is a noticeable interest in the developer community in Russia towards F#.F# rocks… building out various algorithms for DNA processing here and it’s like a drugDarren PlattAmyris Biotechnologysource, permalinkWith F#… we have written a complete genome re-sequencing pipeline with interface, algorithms, reporting in ~5K lines and it has been incredibly reliable, fast and easy to maintain.F# rocks - we’re building out various algorithms for DNA processing here and it’s like a drug. Just implemented a suffix tree in 150 lines that can index 200,000 bases a second ;) We have probably 10-20K lines of code for many scientific applications ranging from a full genome sequencing pipeline that reconstructs and annotated yeast strains, to simulators for various processes and design tools for building DNA sequences/constructs. There are lab located apps that grab robot log files and move them to databases and a tool for viewing a huge collection of DNA sequencing data.F# has been phenomenally useful. I would be writing a lot of this in Python otherwise and F# is more robust, 20x - 100x faster to run and for anything but the most trivial programs, faster to develop.The UI work is especially gratifying, because state of the art for a lot of genomic data display is still PNG images embedded in JavaScript and with F# I can render half a million data points on a web page without jumping through hoops.With Units of Measure I started labelling the coordinates as one or zero based and immediately found a bug where I’d casually mixed the two systems. Yay F#!Many attributes of the F# programming language make it an ideal choice for …the exponentially growing volumes of molecular analysis dataDr. Robert BoissyAssistant ProfessorUniversity of Nebraska Medical CenterpermalinkI am involved in bioinformatics and computational genomics as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). In an academic medical center like UNMC there are heavy demands on my time and a wide range of different types of research projects that I can end up working on. I have used the F# programming language on both the .NET and Mono frameworks for several of these projects, including one that involved a very productive collaboration with IntelliFactory and the use of WebSharper.You can visit the resulting web site and read the freely available peer-reviewed scientific publication that describes the importantinfectious disease research that this F# software development project facilitates. I am always interested in opportunities to work with professional software development enterprises whose teams include developers with F# expertise, because I believe that many attributes of the F# programming language make it an ideal choice for the development of software solutions that integrate Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and the exponentially growing volumes of molecular analysis data that can now be obtained from individual patients (e.g., personal genome DNA sequencing data).There’s an exciting future for F# in this huge, emerging, data-rich health care market.I could not recommend F# highly enough – I insist that you try it!Ben LynchThe Doctors LaboratorypermalinkThe Doctors Laboratory is the largest independent provider of clinical laboratory diagnostic services in the UK. We use F# for the majority of our in house development, from ETL tasks, via reporting scripts to full web applications.F#’s idiomatic development style, starting with a script in the REPL, before moving functions into a more structured project, makes it trivial to explore different approaches, refactor &c. before committing to a particular approach. It also makes developing more enjoyable and direct – there’s no need to get all the boiler plate/plumbing in place; you can just create a script and start coding. The compiler’s type inference system also means quicker coding, with less ‘cruft’. Features such as pattern matching and discriminated unions also lead to leaner, more expressive and transparent code.Type providers mean data can be accessed in a few lines, and there are a wealth of community driven OSS projects available here for a heterogeneous range of data sources. If you need to access a data source not supported by existing providers, then the community positively encourages getting involved to provide one yourself, as in fact we did with the MSACCESS provider for the SQLProvider type provider. The community is first rate in terms of providing support in forums like Stack Overflow, gitter, etc. Other community projects such as Paket (dependency management) and FAKE (build too) make build automation a breeze, too.F# terse syntax made the final code look really similar to the algorithm we wrote at firstGreen Eagle SolutionspermalinkAt Green Eagle Solutions, we develop control systems for renewable energy plants. Thus, it’s crucial for us to test our software in a real-time environment where are all the other actors (protocols, weather conditions, legacy software) come into play.Beforehand, we used Python to quickly build simulators to test our components. With F# we have now all the advantages of a dynamic language, while keeping the static typing safety we are used to. The fact that we don’t need to leave Visual Studio and being able to seamlessly use all the APIs we have developed in C# are also a big plus.We have also started to use F# directly in our components to implementing the core logic, while leaving C# to networking tasks. We’ve taking advantage of this language mix to create a dependency injector which recompiles the F# logic at runtime whenever the script changes for quick development iterations, but loads a precompiled .dll when deployed in production. The double nature of F# as a scripting and a compiled language really shines here.F#’s terse syntax made the final code look really similar to the algorithm we wrote at first in formal language. Also, we’ve come to really appreciate the numerous metaprogramming libraries in the F# ecosystem: we particularly like FSharp.Formatting and have started to adopt the literate programming style to integrate as much as possible the code and the documentation and prevent them losing sync.F# makes is easy to spend your time answering interesting questions about the domain and less time answering questions about the language.Jamie DixonCoderCary, North CarolinapermalinkI did a public records request in my town of Cary, North Carolina. The dataset included appx 25,000 traffic stop records for 2012. Using F#, I did some basic statistical calculations to determine that when you are driving is much more important than where you are driving in terms of getting stopped. In fact, the term ‘speed trap’ is a misnomer. In addition, the data supports the notion that there is a monthly quota of tickets being given. You can read the entire analysis hereAlso, I created a KNN classifier using the date/time of the stop and determined that when you get stopped impacts weather you get a verbal warning versus an actual ticket. You can read the entire analysis hereFinally, I did a public records request in the county in which I live: Wake County North Carolina. The dataset included appx 5,000 health inspection scores for 2012. Using F#, I did some basic statistical calculations to determine that there is little variance of when a restaurant gets inspected and their final score. An interesting offshoot is that some particular restaurants scored lower across all inspectors - except when head inspector did the inspection, then they actually scored better. There might an inherent cultural bias by the inspectors. You can read the entire analysis hereF# was great because I spent less time figuring out how to answer my question and more time actually answering the question. The type providers made consuming and integrating hetrogenous datasets a snap and the pattern matching feature reduced the complexity of the code by an order of magnitude (compared to C#). Finally, by using unit tests and immutable data types, I have a bug-resistant code base that can be extended to other scenarios.The power and flexibility of the language lets us ship features faster, with fewer bugs.Marty DillReminder HeropermalinkAll of our back-end data processing and parsing is done in F#. The power and flexibility of the language lets us ship features faster, with fewer bugs. Regressions are virtually nonexistent, and the functional nature of the language makes it easy to ensure that our code is testable.Our first iterations were written in C#, but after switching to F#, we saw a drastic reduction in code size, along with an increase in readability. We’ll definitely be sticking with F# for all of our future projects.With F# I can develop libraries in a fraction of the time.Mauricio SchefferpermalinkI’ve been using F# libraries in otherwise mostly C# / VB.NET Shop web applications. Thanks to the conciseness of F#, I can develop these libraries in a fraction of the time, then I consume them from C# and VB.NET Shop just like any other library.Furthermore, F#’s succint syntax and REPL make it an excellent scripting language and good for data exploration. Thanks to F#’s interoperability the scripts can easily use domains and libraries written in C#. You never need to start from scratch or have to reinvent things.Language features like record types, discriminated unions and type inference also make F# a great language for prototyping. I often prototype new business domains in F# with a few simplified use cases to refine it. The simple syntax allows me to focus on developing the domain and iterate more quickly. Then, when company policy requires it, I translate it to C# which is usually a straightforward process that ends up with many times more lines of code (yet still perfectly maintainable).F# is a powerful language and it is great to do cross platform development with it.Can ErtenCodingday, Vector CodepermalinkVector code is a code generator for iOS and OsX generating code in Objective C, Swift and C#. It works with vector graphics, parses and runs SVG. It is developed with F# on a Mac.F# is a first class language for Mac OsX. Thanks to the open source compiler, Mono and Xamarin, I was able to build a vector drawing, code generator software with F#. It is really amazing experience! The tooling is great and keeps improving. The compiler and the language are basically the same which is fantastic!F# is a powerful language and it is great to do cross platform development with it. I used heavily quotations for generating code in different languages on vector code. Powerful type system and static compilation meant that, once the application compiled without errors and warnings, it will just work and generate complete code. It did, and now at the App Store.F#’s language features not only made it a no-brainer for our project, but allowed us to produce composable, deterministic, and concise code.Stephen KennedyReadifypermalinkI was consulting at engagement for a large multi-national organization that produces financial software where the need to rewrite the component that deals with importing data from various flat-file formats was identified. The component needed to handle complex business logic and user defined mapping.F# was chosen over C# as it provided a large number of language features related to mapping out of the box. Code quotations, discriminated unions, partial application, matching, and active patterns were used extensively. Having objects immutable by default made the logic very deterministic and easy to maintain / follow.I was incredibly happy with the results, particularly with the declarative nature I could use to describe the various mappings, and their relationship with other mappings. This should make it much easier for other developers and the business analysts to figure out what logic is executed when a particular mapping occurs. The core logic saw a big reduction in code size, however, the real saving was in the entity specific mapping logic which saw the lines of code required go down by more than 90 percent!F# is definitely a language I will be recommending to clients going forward.Many languages are evolving to be ready for the future … F# is already there.Alex HardwickeSurgepermalinkWhen starting to work with Microsoft’s “Modern” WinRT apps, I started by taking the obvious route and used C#. This worked, and I wrote good, functional apps. Despite this, modern programming with C# has problems. I encountered these when writing my BitTorrent app, Surge, and eventually rewrote the app using F#. Doing this gave me better performance, fewer bugs and better user satisfaction.Users expect performant software with an always responsive UI, and frequently expect the apps to work with and display large amounts of data. This leads to us, as developers, working with complex data structures, detailed lists, and to use techniques like parallelism and asynchrony. C# has gained support for these over time, through things like Linq and async/await, but these are poor imitations of the original F# implementations and have flaws.Using a modern, functional language that provides first-class support for things we need in modern development is a no-brainer. Immutability-first as a programming technique has fixed more bugs and bad code in my applications than almost anything else I’ve ever looked at, and it’s something C# will never gain.It’s not just C#, either. Many languages are evolving to be ready for the future, adding features that support the needs of a modern programming language, but F# is already there.F# allowed us to mix Domain-Driven Design, Functional Programming and Azure to deliver a high quality web application.Jorge FioranellipermalinkThe site http://amancai.com.au was built combining F#, Domain-Driven Desing, The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site MVC and Azure. F# was an excellent choice as it allowed us to keep the code lean and very functional while having full access to the BCL, Azure and third party libraries.Using F# Type Providers also helped us to improve our productivity and find problems early during the development process.I personally enjoyed the experience of building the entire system using F#, I believe its “functional-first” approach is excellent for building a wide range of applications.Programming in F# feels like writing out ideas rather than codeMaria GorinovapermalinkWhen I started working on the T2 temporal logic prover, I knew little about termination analysis and formal verification. F# made it easy to dive into these concepts and boosted my productivity by allowing me to write clean, concise, and accurate programs. Its functional nature, clear syntax and type inference is combined with the flexibility to write in an imperative style and use the .NET framework. This combination powerfully bridges the gap between thinking about a concept and implementing it. Programming in F# feels like writing out ideas rather than code.

Why should they ?They have never accepted the burden of guilt for the Congo Holocaust, which will deny their individualities.What move on they should get ?The Belgians gave us the priceless Western civilization, the fruits of their labor.As a white man once wrote :So long as white people allow other groups, with equally sordid pasts, to guilt us into giving them free things, we will always be the villain. whether we’re anglo-saxon, scandinavian, germanic, slavic or mediterranean, so long as we accept the burden of guilt, our individuality will be denied, we will all be lumped together under the umbrella of “white” and be named the devil.We ’ve given the world enough of the fruits of our labor, and that we should stop the gravy train at the next station. alas, the marxists control academia and the media, and the anti-white revisionist version of history is a very useful tool for their political ideology.—————-UN tells Belgium to apologise for its colonial past in CongoThe United Nations has told Belgium to apologise for its colonial past and criticised its newly renovated Africa Museum for not doing enough to exorcise the demons of it exploitation of the Congo.Filled with more than 180,000 looted items and 500 stuffed animals, the museum celebrated the Belgians, who turned the Congo into a slave state ruled by Leopold II, for more than a century. The king’s brutal regime, which inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, killed millions and ruthlessly plundered the region of rubber.After a week-long investigation, a UN working group said that racism suffered by those of African origin in Belgium could be traced back to the country’s failure to address its past. The panel noted the many remaining statues of Leopold and monuments to the colonial army that dot the streets and parks of Brussels.“We urge the government to apologise for the atrocities committed during the colonisation," said group president Michal Balcherzak.Charles Michel, Belgium’s prime minister, said he thought the findings, to be published in full in September, were “very strange”.“We will have the opportunity to make our formal remarks. We certainly will,” he said and insisted Belgium stood against all forms of discrimination.OHCHR | Statement to the media by the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, on the conclusion of its official visit to Belgium, 4-11 February 2019The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent thanks the Government of Belgium for its invitation to visit the country from 4 to 11 February 2019, and for its cooperation. In particular, we thank the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. We also thank the OHCHR Regional Office for Europe for their support to the visit.The views expressed in this statement are of a preliminary nature and our final findings and recommendations will be presented in our mission report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in September 2019.During the visit, the Working Group assessed the human rights situation of people of African descent living in Belgium, and gathered information on the forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance they face. The Working Group studied the official measures taken and mechanisms to prevent systemic racial discrimination and to protect victims of racism, as well as responses to multiple forms of discrimination.As part of its fact-finding mission, the Working Group visited Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, Namur and Charleroi. It met with senior officials of the Belgian Government at the federal, regional, community and local levels, the legislature, law enforcement, national human rights institutions, OHCHR Regional Office, non-governmental organizations, as well as communities and individuals working to promote the rights of people of African descent in Belgium. The Working Group toured the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). It also visited the St. Gilles prison in Brussels.We thank the many people of African descent and others, representing civil society organizations, human rights defenders, women’s organizations, lawyers, and academics whom we met during the visit. The contributions of those working to promote and protect the rights of people of African descent, creating initiatives, and proposing strategies to address structural racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance are invaluable.The protection of human rights and the prohibition of racial discrimination is enshrined in Articles 10-11 in the Belgian Constitution. Belgium’s national anti-racism legislation is the 1981 anti-discrimination law, updated in 2007. Regions and communities also have anti-discrimination legislation.We welcome the initiatives undertaken by Government at the federal, regional and community levels to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. We encourage efforts to raise awareness and support civil society including through the provision of funding.The Working Group recognizes the important work of the Inter-Federal Centre for Equal Opportunities (Unia) in the protection and promotion of human rights, and in documenting racism and inequality at the federal and regional levels. Unia also provides recommendations on participation, tolerance, discrimination and diversity as well as their implementation in Belgium. Its diversity barometers provide important information on the human rights situation of people of African descent.Throughout our visit we appreciated the willingness of public officials to discuss how public and private institutions may sustain racial disparities. We welcome the national network of expertise on crime against people, a robust infrastructure for combatting hate crime. In Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, Namur and Charleroi, the Working Group received information about social integration and intercultural efforts for new arrivals, including referral to language tuition. In Liege, we welcome the commitment enshrined in the Charter, Liege Against Racism.The Working Group also welcomes the civil society initiatives to promote the International Decade for people of African descent in Belgium.One of the ways the African diaspora in Belgium is expressing its voice is through cultural events such as the Congolisation festival to highlight the contribution of Congolese artists to the Belgian cultural landscape and make people begin to appreciate and reflect on the diaspora’s artistic heritage.Despite the positive measures referred to above, the Working Group is concerned about the human rights situation of people of African descent in Belgium who experience racism and racial discrimination.There is clear evidence that racial discrimination is endemic in institutions in Belgium. Civil society reported common manifestations of racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance faced by people of African descent. The root causes of present day human rights violations lie in the lack of recognition of the true scope of violence and injustice of colonisation. As a result, public discourse does not reflect a nuanced understanding of how institutions may drive systemic exclusion from education, employment, and opportunity. The Working Group concludes that inequalities are deeply entrenched because of structural barriers that intersect and reinforce each other. Credible efforts to counter racism require first overcoming these hurdles.We note with concern the public monuments and memorials that are dedicated to King Leopold II and Force Publique officers, given their complicity in atrocities in Africa. The Working Group is of the view that closing the dark chapter in history, and reconciliation and healing, requires that Belgians should finally confront, and acknowledge, King Leopold II’s and Belgium’s role in colonization and its long-term impact on Belgium and Africa.The most visible postcolonial discourse in a Belgian public institution takes place within the recently reopened Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), which is both a research and a cultural institution. RMCA has sought to review its approach to include critical, postcolonial analysis- a marked shift for an institution originally charged with promulgating colonial propaganda. The Working Group is of the view that the reorganization of the museum has not gone far enough. For those communities that do engage in vibrant postcolonial discourse, i.e., civil society and activists, the reorganization falls short of its goal of providing adequate context and critical analysis. The Working Group notes the importance of removing all colonial propaganda and accurately presenting the atrocities of Belgium’s colonial past. The RMCA admits that decolonization is a process and reports its intention to evolve towards sharing power with people and institutions of African descent.The Working Group welcomes this process of decolonization, as even recent cultural production in Belgium reflects enduring legacies of the colonial past. For example, a 2002 exhibit of eight Africans in a private zoo in Belgium (Cameroonians brought to Belgium without visas) recalls Belgium’s notorious “human zoos” between 1897 and 1958.Reportedly, between 1959 and 1962, thousands of children born to white fathers and African mothers in Belgian-ruled Congo, Rwanda and Burundi were abducted and sent to Belgium for adoption. The Working Group notes with approval that the 2016 appeal by Metis de Belgique for state recognition was met with an apology from the Catholic Church the following year and a 2018 parliamentary resolution on la ségrégation subie par les métis issus de la colonisation belge en Afrique. The Working Group commends the provision of funding for data gathering, research and accountability within this framework.Belgium often refers to intercultural, rather than multicultural, goals with the idea of preserving individual cultural heritage and practices while coexisting in peace and prosperity with respect and regard for the intersection and interaction of diverse cultures. This diversity includes citizens, migrants, people of first, second, and third generation residency, highly educated people, and groups that have contributed enormously to the modern Belgian state. Interculturality requires reciprocity, rejection of harmful cultural stereotype, and valuing of all cultures, including those of people of African descent.The Working Group notes with concern the absence of disaggregated data based on ethnicity or race. Disaggregated data is required for ensuring the recognition of people of African descent and overcoming historical “social invisibility”. Without such data, it is impossible to ensure that Belgium’s reported commitments to equality are actually realized. Some anti-discrimination bodies have found proxy data (relating to parental origin) that have informed equality and anti-racism analyses; additional data relating to regroupement famille (and other data) may also extend these analyses to Belgian citizens of African descent.Belgium has a complex political system. This must not impede fulfilment of its obligations to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The lack of an A-Status National Human Rights Institution and a National Action Plan to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance must be addressed. Belgium should engage actively in partnership with people of African descent, particularly experts in navigating these complexities, to promote equality and to diminish entrenched racial disparity.The Working Group notes both civil society and law enforcement acknowledge the prevalence of racial profiling in policing. Reportedly, counter-terrorism policies have contributed to an increase in racial profiling by law enforcement. The federal police recognized the concern with racial profiling and offered additional information about a pilot study in Mechelen to document all stops and searches (including a narrative basis for the stop) over a two-year period. However, it is unclear how this may effectively target racial profiling as the race of the community members stopped by the police are not included among the data captured by the stop report.The Working Group visited St. Gilles Prison in Brussels. The Working Group found the prison dilapidated and overcrowded. It is scheduled for relocation in 2022. Frequent strikes by prison personnel dramatically impact the conditions of confinement for incarcerated people housed there, including suspensions of visitation, showers, phone access, recreation, and prolonged lockdowns. Another concern raised by the detainees was the lack of attention to their requests for medical attention. There were also individual reports of racist behaviour by some of the guards, and the administration committed to individually counselling perpetrators and zero-tolerance for racism.The Working Group notes with deep concern, the lack of representation of people of African descent in the judiciary, law enforcement, government service, correctional service, municipal councils, regional and federal parliaments. These institutions do not reflect the diversity of the Belgian population. When the Working Group visited Belgium in 2005, the federal police reported the existence of a robust recruitment program to promote diversity. While this program was again presented as a serious commitment, no data are currently available to establish what improvements, if any, had been made in the past fourteen years and whether the program has been successful.Civil society and community members commented on the lack of positive role models in the news media, on billboards, and in Belgian television and film. The French Community referenced best practices involving a barometer of print media aimed at measuring equality and diversity among journalists and in news content, and creating of an expert panel to broaden representation.The Working Group noted deficiencies in the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights, among people of African descent in Belgium. According to research, sixty percent of Afro-Belgians are educated to degree level, but they are four times more likely to be unemployed than the national average. Eighty percent say they have been victims of discrimination from a very young age. Public officials consistently rationalized systematic exclusion of people of African descent with references to language and culture, even in cases involving second generation Belgians.The Working Group repeatedly heard from civil society that Belgians of African descent faced “downgrading” and other employment challenges. People with university and graduate degrees reported working well-below their educational levels, including in manual labor despite possessing university certificates from Belgian universities. They also highlighted the difficulty in obtaining recognition of foreign diplomas. They also reported systematic exclusion from job assistance as job centers declined to refer people of African descent to employment opportunities at their educational levels. UNIA has also documented pervasive downgrading of employment and the prevalence of people of African descent working well below their education levels, despite the fact that they are among the most educated in the Belgian society.The Working Group is concerned that primary and secondary school curricula do not adequately reflect the history of colonization as well as history and contributions of people of African descent in Belgium. Whether colonial history of Belgium is mentioned is largely dependent on interest and initiative of individual teachers. Where curriculum exists, it appears to recapitulate colonial propaganda including the suggestion that economic development came to Africa as a result of colonization while omitting references to key historical figures of African descent such as Patrice Lumumba. Reportedly, one-fourth of the high school graduates are unaware that Congo was a former Belgian colony.At every interaction with civil society, the Working Group heard testimonies of the systematic practice of diverting children of African descent to vocational or manual training and out of the general education trajectory. This severely impacts the right to education and the right to childhood. Parents reported struggling to keep their children from being diverted, resisting transfers to vocational education, fighting to avoid having their children classified with behavioural or learning disorders and being threatened with the involvement of child protective services. A few parents discussed creative strategies to navigate these systems and secure their children’s education, including using the home school testing process and enrolling their children in boarding school. University students also reported being discouraged from continuing their educations or progressing.Several community members discussed severe impact to their mental health due to racial discrimination. This included individualized racial slurs and hostile treatment, and several members of civil society in different locations mentioned the dramatic impact of daily racism on their lives – including depression and becoming withdrawn – and the fact that no one in authority in their schools ever noticed or intervened.Civil society reported frequent discrimination in housing and rental markets. They would be immediately rejected by landlords who could detect an African accent over the phone or who recognized their names as African or informed the apartment was unavailable once they met the landlord face-to-face. Government informed of the use of “mystery calls,” a process involving the use of testers where landlords were identified as potentially discriminating unlawfully. The program was only recently commenced, pursuant to the Unia report and in conjunction with them, and few cases had been completed at the time of our visit.The Working Group heard considerable testimony from civil society and community members on intersectionality, that people who meet the criteria for multiple marginalized groups may be particularly vulnerable, face extreme violence and harassment, and yet often remain invisible or deprioritized even within communities of African descent. This is particularly true for undocumented people of African descent whose lives are particularly precarious and who lack regularisation for years. In addition, women of African descent, particularly recent migrants, faced challenges pursuing justice, social support, or even shelter for domestic violence.People of African descent and Muslim religious identity questioned why law enforcement authorities assumed they had terrorist ties. Some public officials implicitly acknowledged their role in this, including defending the use of racial profiling as a counter terrorism tactic and suggesting a false equivalence between anti-radicalism efforts and anti-racism programs, i.e., failing to understand that race-based assumptions regarding radicalism are inaccurate, grounded in bias, and divert key resources from protecting Belgian society from actual threats.The Working Group is concerned about the rise of populist nationalism, racist hate speech and xenophobic discourse as a political tool. We reiterate the concerns raised by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2015 that the government has yet to adopt legislation declaring organizations which promote and incite racial discrimination illegal, in conformity with Article 4 of the Convention.The use of blackface, racialized caricatures, and racist representations of people of African descent is offensive, dehumanizing and contemptuous. Regrettably, the re-publication of Tintin in the Congo unedited and without contextualization perpetuates negative stereotypes and either should be withdrawn or contextualized with an addendum reflecting current commitments to anti-racism.The Working Group found little awareness about the International Decade for people of African descent. Civil society stands ready to support implementation of the Programme of Activities of the International Decade.The following recommendations are intended to assist Belgium in its efforts to combat all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance:The Government of Belgium should adopt a comprehensive inter-federal National Action Plan against racism, upholding the commitments it made 2002, following the World Conference Against Racism. The National Action Plan against racism should be developed in partnership with people of African descent.Adopt a National Strategy for the inclusion of people of African descent in Belgium, including migrants, and create a National Platform for people of African descent.Establish an independent National Human Rights Institution, in conformity with the Paris Principles, and in partnership with people of African descent.The Government should consider ratifying the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.The Working Group urges the Government to comply with the recommendations made by the Unia, including those relating to combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.The Working Group urges the government to fund creative projects by people of African descent such as the House of African Culture, among others, with the view of raising the visibility of all forms of African expression and preserving the history and memory of the African Diaspora.We urge universities throughout Belgium to endow chairs in African Studies, and prioritize the hiring of faculty of African descent, with the view to foster research and the dissemination of knowledge in this area, as well as to diversify the academy.The Government should ensure funding for anti-racism associations run by people of African descent to enable them to be partners in combatting racism. The Working Group also recommends inclusive financing mechanisms for entrepreneurs of African Descent.We welcome the renaming of the former Square du Bastion to Patrice Lumumba Square in June 2018 as well as an exhibit commemorating Congolese soldiers who fought in World War I, and encourage further, durable commemoration of contributions of people of African descent and the removal of markers of the colonial period.We urge the government to give recognition and visibility to those who were killed during the period of colonization, to Congolese soldiers who fought during the two World Wars, and to acknowledge the cultural, economic, political and scientific contributions of people of African descent to the development of Belgian society through the establishment of monuments, memorial sites, street names, schools, municipal, regional and federal buildings. This should be done in consultation with civil society.The Working Group recommends reparatory justice, with a view to closing the dark chapter in history and as a means of reconciliation and healing. We urge the government to issue an apology for the atrocities committed during colonization. The right to reparations for past atrocities is not subject to any statute of limitations. The Working Group recommends the CARICOM 10-point action plan for reparatory justice as a guiding framework.The Working Group supports the establishment of a truth commission, and supports the draft bill before Parliament entitled “A memorial work plan to establish facts and the implication of Belgian institutions in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi”, dated 14 February 2017.The authorities should ensure full access to archives relevant for research on Belgian colonialism.The Working Group urges the relevant authorities to ensure that the RMCA be entrusted with tasks and responsibilities in the context of the International Decade for people of African Descent. In this context, the Working Group recommends that the RMCA be provided with appropriate financial and human resources, which would allow it to fully exercise the potential of this institution and engage in further improving and enriching its narrative, thus contributing to a better awareness and understanding of the tragic legacies of Belgian colonialism as well as past and contemporary human rights challenges of people of African descent.The Working Group encourages the RMCA, in collaboration with historians from Africa and the diaspora, to remove all offensive racist exhibits and ensure detailed explanations and context to inform and educate visitors accurately about Belgium’s colonial history and its exploitation of Africa.The Working Group urges the Government to provide specific, directed funding to the RMCA to enrich its postcolonial analysis. This funding should allow for innovations like QR codes on museum placards to provide more context and enrich intersectional analyses, including the historical and current interplay of race, gender, sexuality, migration status, religion and other relevant criteria.The Working Group urges the Government to financially support a public education campaign in partnership with people of African descent, to learn and better understand the legacies of Belgian colonialism.The Working Group strongly recommends that the Government collects, compiles, analyses, disseminates and publishes reliable statistical data disaggregated by race and on the basis of voluntary self-identification, and undertakes all necessary measures to assess regularly the situation of individuals and groups of individuals who are victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.The Working Group calls on the Government to address racial profiling and institute a policy of documenting and analyzing stops and searches nationwide, including race and skin color, in order to promote and ensure equality and fairness on policing; mitigate selective enforcement of the law; address enduring bias, stereotype, and beliefs about the need to surveil and control people of African descent.Ensure that the robust framework set up for the prosecution of hate crimes is used more in practice.Review diversity initiatives within justice institutions as well as other sectors including education and media, to develop clear benchmarks to increase diversity measurably and overcome structural discrimination and unconscious bias through positive measures, in accordance with the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.Clarify and simplify jurisdiction of anti-discrimination authorities, creating one point of entry to ease reporting for victims and to coordinate and enhance accountability for perpetrators of racist harassment and violence, including accelerated judicial procedures.The Government should review and ensure that textbooks and educational materials accurately reflect historical facts as they relate to past tragedies and atrocities such as enslavement, the trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism. Belgium should use UNESCO’s General History of Africa to inform its educational curriculum, among similarly oriented authoritative texts. We urge the government to promote greater knowledge and recognition of and respect for the culture, history and heritage of people of African descent living in Belgium. This should include the mandatory teaching of Belgium’s colonial history at all levels of the education system.The Ministries of Education and the local Communities must determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in diversion of children of African descent from mainstream education into vocational or technical education streams, as compared to white Belgian children.All teachers should complete anti-racism training, including training on implicit bias and specific manifestations in the context of their work. The training should involve testing to evaluate the understanding of diversity among teachers.All public officials charged with education responsibilities must develop clear, objective, and transparent processes and criteria that govern when a child should be diverted from mainstream education, the need to guard against implicit bias and race-based outcomes in decision-making, and the right of parents to resist or overrule the recommendations of teachers without harassment.The Government should take all necessary measures to combat racial discrimination and ensure full implementation of the right to adequate standard of living, including the right to adequate housing, access to affordable health care, employment and education for people of African descent.Invest in integrated trust-building measures between the police, judicial institutions, the Unia, social integration institutions, anti-racist associations, and victims of racial discrimination and race and gender based violence, to ensure that racist acts, violence or crimes are systematically reported, prosecuted and compensated.Belgium should conduct a racial equity audit within its public institutions and incentivize private employers and institutions to do the same. The purpose of the audit is to look for systemic bias and discrimination within the regular and routine operation of business. Belgium should commit to a public release of the findings and to implementing recommendations developed in the audit process.Belgium should examine existing statistics and proxy data to determine whether people of African descent in Belgium, including Belgian citizens of African descent, experience and exercise their human rights consistently with the averages for all Belgians. This includes data on citizenship, parents’ place of birth, and regroupement famille (family reunification) data for reunification from countries of African descent.Belgium should adopt clear, objective, and transparent protocols for job centers to ensure they do not perpetuate stereotype and bias, including requiring referrals to be based on level of education or experience, and recognizing that language should not be a disqualifying factor once a measurable competence is determined.The Working Group recommends the Government support and facilitate an open debate on the use of blackface, racialized caricatures and racist representation of people of African descent. The republication of Tintin in the Congo should be withdrawn or contextualized with an addendum reflecting current commitments to anti-racism.The Working Group calls on politicians at all levels of society to avoid instrumentalzing racism, xenophobia and hate speech in the pursuit of political office and to encourages them to promote inclusion, solidarity, non-discrimination and meaningful commitments to equality. Media is also reminded of its important role in this regard.The Working Group reminds media of their important role as a public watchdog with special responsibilities for ensuring that factual and reliable information about people of African descent is reported.The Working Group urges the Government to involve civil society organisations representing people of African descent when framing important legislations concerning them and providing those organizations with adequate funding.The International Decade on People of African Descent should be officially launched in Belgium at the federal level.The Working Group also encourages the Government to further implement the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda within Belgium, with focus on indicators relevant for people of African descent, in partnership with civil society. In view of Statbel’s 2018 report on poverty, the Working Group calls on the government to eradicate structural racism to attain the Sustainable Development Goals.The Working Group would like to reiterate its satisfaction at the Government’s willingness to engage in dialogue, cooperation and action to combat racial discrimination. We hope that our report will support the Government in this process and we express our willingness to assist in this important endeavour.

“WAR IS HELL”“It’s like the war never ended.”And the Price we still pay for itWar is hell a phrase attributed to General Sherman, and figure wrongly attributed to him alone, since many men from the beginning of time knew that, to be so.I guess you got to judge that on an individual basis, every person would have a different opinion, regarding his own circumstances, and also you have to take in account about what generation you are talking about?During my childhood we were fed WWII, a thing its not longer true today, most people who write here in Quora about the war do for several reasons, maybe interested in History, or fascinated by war and heroism, some even discuss the merit of this weapon, over that one, some even come with the common: If, to propose different outcomes, like if they are not happy as things unfolded, hey, the reasons can be so many as to why?I got to confess my interest in WWII was born in my childhood fed up by Hollywood, and later by reading war books, now I hardly see a movie, or read a war book, mainly here in Quora, were it seems to be a hot topic, but of little relevance to many others whose life its far removed from thinking about WWII.Whenever write about any other topic of interest to me, it seems get small views, compared to topics involving WWII, and therefore the reason why I do write about WWII, I figure if I had spent so much time in the past reading about it, I may as well use it.After all if I gone do an effort of writing something, I want for people to read it, otherwise I feel I am wasting my time.However the only psychological effect for me about WWII has being to turn me into an staunch Pacifist, and make me a cynic of war, and politics.Notwithstanding my personal sense of justice, and the ideal, we may find a way out of the ignorance, hate, and every other malady we Humans suffer, as hard this is to conceive, if anything it helps my attitude towards life.War doesn’t solve anything, not good for the defeated, neither for the winner, who later on will pay a price for it, even if most people cannot perceive, or understand it.Here its the first movie that I remember seeing it as a child, and it just happen to be a War related movie of WWII, one of the hundreds I saw after that one.TEN SECONDS TO HELLAnd yes, War is Hell, even after it, as the movie itself, not of the war, but the aftermath, still taking lives, even if war was over.And only in this issue alone there’s a lot to be said, not counting so much other damages.The US Army Air Force and Royal Air Force dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe during World War II. Every year, an estimated 2,000 tons of World War II munitions are found in Germany, at times requiring the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents from their homes.[1] In Berlin alone, 1.8 million pieces of ordnance have been defused since 1947. Buried bombs, as well as mortars, land mines and grenades, are often found during construction work or other excavations, or by farmers tilling the land.More than 70 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land.Later in 2001 remember seeing a British production named:Danger! Unexploded Bomb. by Carlton TelevisionThe men who ran towards the bombs: The Blitz heroes who saved countless lives defusing UXBsBy James OwenOn a chill December evening in 1940, Captain Max Blaney was overseeing the extraction of an unexploded bomb from a vast crater in Romford Road, East London.An experienced, careful officer, he had taken every precaution before hoisting the 550lb weapon out of the ground.Its two detonating fuses had been identified: one was a clockwork time fuse with an 80-hour limit, the other a motion-sensitive fuse with a 60-hour shelf-life.Against the clock: Two actors play members of the BD work to diffuse a half-buried bombOn a chill December evening in 1940, Captain Max Blaney was overseeing the extraction of an unexploded bomb from a vast crater in Romford Road, East London.An experienced, careful officer, he had taken every precaution before hoisting the 550lb weapon out of the ground.Its two detonating fuses had been identified: one was a clockwork time fuse with an 80-hour limit, the other a motion-sensitive fuse with a 60-hour shelf-life.Against the clock: Two actors play members of the BD work to diffuse a half-buried bombAs several days had passed between the bomb landing and the team reaching the site, it seemed that both were now harmless.To be sure, Blaney used a clock-stopper, a newly invented device that clamped around the bomb and used a magnetic field to jam the time-fuse's mechanism.He had hoped to use another innovation, too, a steam sterilizer that dissolved and pumped out the bomb's explosive, but the lorry bringing it had got stuck in traffic - perhaps because it was Friday 13th - so Blaney decided to proceed without it.He had to remove the clock-stopper briefly to get the hoist around the bomb, but as the fuses had expired this did not appear risky.When the bomb was hauled up from its tomb, Blaney stepped forward to steady it.As he did so there was a huge explosion. In a microsecond, the bomb was transformed into a searing blast of noise, light and heat that tore outwards, clawing flesh, pulverizing bone.Danger: A policeman keeps the public away from a German bombBlaney, the eight men who had been pulling on the rope and a watching policeman were all killed.The day after the explosion, a button from the policeman's uniform was found embedded deep in a door frame away down the street. Very little else that was found was so easily recognizable.There Are Still Thousands of Tons of Unexploded Bombs in Germany, Left Over From World War IIMore than 70 years after being dropped in Europe, the ordnance is still inflicting harm and mayhemFlying Fortresses of the 303rd bomber group (Hell’s Angels) drop a heavy load on industrial targets in Germany. (Bettmann / Corbis)By Adam HigginbothamShortly before 11 a.m. on March 15, 1945, the first of 36 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 493rd Bombardment Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force thundered down the concrete runway of Little Walden airfield in Essex, England, and rose slowly into the air. They headed east, gradually gaining altitude until, assembled in tight box formations at the head of a stream of more than 1,300 heavy bombers, they crossed the Channel coast north of Amsterdam at an altitude of almost five miles. Inside the unpressurized aluminum fuselage of each aircraft, the temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero, the air too thin to breathe. They flew on into Germany, passing Hanover and Magdeburg, the exhaust of each B-17’s four engines condensing into the white contrails every crewman hated for betraying their position to defenders below. But the Luftwaffe was on its knees; no enemy aircraft engaged the bombers of the 493rd.B-24J bomber 'Old Sack' and crew, of USAAF 493rd Bombardment Group, at RAF Debach, England, United Kingdom, spring 1944 ww2dbaseAround 2:40 p.m., some ten miles northwest of Berlin, the city of Oranienburg appeared beneath them, shrouded in a mist along the lazy curves of Havel River, and the sky blossomed with puffs of jet-black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. Sitting in the nose in the lead plane, the bombardier stared through his bombsight into the haze far below. As his B-17 approached the Oder-Havel Canal, he watched as the needles of the automatic release mechanism converged. Five bombs tumbled away into the icy sky.Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of that amount on Germany. By the time the Nazi government surrendered, in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich—railheads, arms factories and oil refineries—had been crippled, and dozens of cities across Germany had been reduced to moonscapes of cinder and ash.Under Allied occupation, reconstruction began almost immediately. Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs dropped by Allied aircraft had failed to explode, and as East and West Germany rose from the ruins of the Reich, thousands of tons of unexploded airborne ordnance lay beneath them. In both East and West, responsibility for defusing these bombs—along with removing the innumerable hand grenades, bullets and mortar and artillery shells left behind at the end of the war—fell to police bomb-disposal technicians and firefighters, the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst, or KMBD.Even now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. Still, last May, some 20,000 people were cleared from an area of Cologne while authorities removed a one-ton bomb that had been discovered during construction work. In November 2013, another 20,000 people in Dortmund were evacuated while experts defused a 4,000-pound “Blockbuster” bomb that could destroy most of a city block. In 2011, 45,000 people—the largest evacuation in Germany since World War II—were forced to leave their homes when a drought revealed a similar device lying on the bed of the Rhine in the middle of Koblenz. Although the country has been at peace for three generations, German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. Eleven bomb technicians have been killed in Germany since 2000, including three who died in a single explosion while trying to defuse a 1,000-pound bomb on the site of a popular flea market in Göttingen in 2010.Early one recent winter morning, Horst Reinhardt, chief of the Brandenburg state KMBD, told me that when he started in bomb disposal in 1986, he never believed he would still be at it almost 30 years later. Yet his men discover more than 500 tons of unexploded munitions every year and defuse an aerial bomb every two weeks or so. “People simply don’t know that there’s still that many bombs under the ground,” he said.And in one city in his district, the events of 70 years ago have ensured that unexploded bombs remain a daily menace. The place looks ordinary enough: a drab main street, pastel-painted apartment houses, an orderly railway station and a McDonald’s with a tubular thicket of bicycles parked outside. Yet, according to Reinhardt, Oranienburg is the most dangerous city in Germany.image:“It’s becoming increasingly difficult,” says bomb-squad leader Horst Reinhardt. (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)Between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m. on March 15, 1945, more than 600 aircraft of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,500 tons of high explosives over Oranienburg, a cluster of strategic targets including rail yards that were a hub for troops headed to the Eastern Front, a Heinkel aircraft plant and, straddling the rail yards, two factories run by the chemical conglomerate Auergesellschaft. Allied target lists had described one of those facilities as a gas-mask factory, but by early 1945 U.S. intelligence had learned that Auergesellschaft had begun processing enriched uranium, the raw material for the atomic bomb, in Oranienburg.Oranienburg Bomb site after explosionAlthough the March 15 attack was ostensibly aimed at the rail yards, it had been personally requested by the director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, who was determined to keep Nazi nuclear research out of the hands of rapidly advancing Russian troops. Of the 13 Allied air attacks eventually launched on the city, this one, the fourth within a year, was by far the heaviest and most destructive.As one squadron of B-17s followed another into its run, almost five thousand 500- and 1,000-pound bombs and more than 700 incendiaries fell across the rail yards, the chemical factory and into the residential streets nearby. The first explosions started fires around the railroad station; by the time the final B-17s began their attack, smoke from the burning city was so heavy the bombardiers had difficulty seeing where their bombs were falling. But where it cleared, the men of the First Air Division watched three concentrations of high explosives fall into houses near the road over the Lehnitzstrasse canal bridge, around a mile southeast of the rail station and a few hundred yards from one of the chemical factories.These bomb loads were unlike almost any others the Eighth Air Force dropped over Germany during the war. The majority of the bombs were armed not with percussion fuses, which explode on impact, but with time-delay fuses, which both sides used throughout the war in order to extend the terror and chaos caused by aerial attacks. The sophisticated, chemical-based fuses­—designated M124 and M125, depending on the weight of the bomb—were intended to be used sparingly; U.S. Army Air Force guidelines recommended fitting them in no more than 10 percent of bombs in any given attack. But for reasons that have never become clear, almost every bomb dropped during the March 15 raid on Oranienburg was armed with one.RAF ground crew handling the TallboyScrewed into a bomb’s tail beneath its stabilizing fins, the fuse contained a small glass capsule of corrosive acetone mounted above a stack of paper-thin celluloid disks less than half an inch in diameter. The disks held back a spring-loaded firing pin, cocked behind a detonator. As the bomb fell, it tilted nose-down, and a windmill in the tail stabilizer began spinning in the slipstream, turning a crank that broke the glass capsule. The bomb was designed to hit the ground nose-down, so the acetone would drip toward the disks and begin eating through them. This could take minutes or days, depending on the concentration of acetone and the number of disks the armorers had fitted into the fuse. When the last disk weakened and snapped, the spring was released, the firing pin struck the priming charge and—finally, unexpectedly—the bomb exploded.image:Oranienburg in 1945 (Luftbilddatenbank)Around three o’clock that afternoon, a B-17 from the Eighth Air Force released a 1,000-pound bomb some 20,000 feet above the rail yards. Quickly reaching terminal velocity, it fell toward the southwest, missing the yards and the chemical plants. It fell instead toward the canal and the two bridges connecting Oranienburg and the suburb of Lehnitz, closing on a wedge of low-lying land framed by the embankments of Lehnitzstrasse and the railroad line. Before the war this had been a quiet spot beside the water, leading to four villas among the trees, parallel to a canal on Baumschulenweg. But now it was occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow, wooden, single-story barracks built by the Wehrmacht. This was where the bomb finally found the earth—just missing the more westerly of the two barracks and plunging into the sandy soil at more than 150 miles per hour. It bored down at an oblique angle before the violence of its passage tore the stabilizing fins away from the tail, when it abruptly angled upward until, its kinetic energy finally spent, the bomb and its M125 fuse came to rest: nose-up but still deep underground.By four o’clock, the skies over Oranienburg had fallen silent. The city center was ablaze, the first of the delayed explosions had started: The Auergesellschaft plant would soon be destroyed and the rail yards tangled with wreckage. But the bomb beside the canal lay undisturbed. As the shadows of the trees on Lehnitzstrasse lengthened in the low winter sun, acetone dripped slowly from the shattered glass capsule within the bomb’s fuse. Taken by gravity, it trickled harmlessly downward, away from the celluloid disks it was supposed to weaken.Grand Slam bomb exploding near Arnsberg viaduct 1945Less than two months later, Nazi leaders capitulated. As much as ten square miles of Berlin had been reduced to rubble. In the months following V-E Day that May, a woman who had been bombed out of her home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oranienburg, where she had a boyfriend. The town was a constellation of yawning craters and gutted factories, but beside Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the canal, she found a small wooden barracks empty and intact. She moved in with her boyfriend and her son.Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs claimed their first postwar victims almost as soon as the last guns fell silent. In June 1945, a cache of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; three months later in Hamburg, a buried American 500-pound bomb with a time-delay fuse took the lives of the four technicians working to disarm it. Clearing unexploded munitions became the task of the German states’ KMBD. It was dangerous work done at close quarters, removing fuses with wrenches and hammers. “You need a clear head. And calm hands,” Horst Reinhardt told me. He said he never felt fear during the defusing process. “If you’re afraid, you can’t do it. For us, it’s a completely normal job. In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.”“In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.”In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians. Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused. But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed. A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in 1986, both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5.5 million aerial photographs in the declassified wartime archives of the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, held in Keele in England. Between 1940 and 1945, ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved. Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters.Around the same time, Hans-Georg Carls, a geographer working on a municipal project using aerial photography to map trees in Würzburg, in southern Germany, stumbled on another trove of ACIU images. Stored in a teacher’s cellar in Mainz, they had been ordered from the archives of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60,000 of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece.image:Photo analyst Hans-Georg Carls (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)When he compared what he’d bought with what the German government had copied from the British, he realized he had images the British didn’t. Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades. Crucially, Carls also found the maps made by the pilots who shot the film—“sortie plots” showing exactly where each run of pictures had been taken—which had often been archived elsewhere, and without which the images would be meaningless.Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between 1939 and 1945. Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have. From that data he could compile an Ergebniskarte—a “result map”—for clients ranging from international consortiums to homeowners, with high-risk areas crosshatched in red. “He was the pioneer,” said Allan Williams, curator of Britain’s National Collection of Aerial Photography, which now includes the pictures once held in Keele.Carls, now nearing 68 and semi-retired, employs a staff of more than 20, with offices occupying the top three floors of his large house in a suburb of Würzburg. Image analysis is now a central component of bomb disposal in each of Germany’s 16 states, and Carls has provided many of the photographs they use, including all of those used by Reinhardt and the Brandenburg KMBD.One day in the Luftbilddatenbank office, Johannes Kroeckel, 37, one of Carls’ senior photo-interpreters, called up a Google Earth satellite image of the area north of Berlin on one of two giant computer monitors on his desk. He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than 200 aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed. A week after the March 15 raid, photographs 4113 and 4114 were taken from 27,000 feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart. They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image. I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg.A small German firm offers a unique service to the country's construction industry: It uses historical British and American aerial photography from World War II air strikes to determine the location of unexploded bombs. Thousands of tons of bombs still lie in the soil and the duds are becoming more dangerous.Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,000-bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family. Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. “Maybe you have shadows of trees or houses,” he said, pointing to a crisp quadrilateral of late-winter shade cast by one of the villas a few hundred yards from the canal. “You can’t see every unexploded bomb with the aerials.” But there was more than enough evidence to mark an Ergebniskarte in ominous red ink.Then, and Now Bomb CratersPaule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in 1993. He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, 1949, and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious. When he turned 10, he and a dozen or so other children who shared the birthday were taken to tea with President Wilhelm Pieck, who gave them each passbooks to savings accounts containing 15 Ost­marks. At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany. Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority. He was given an apartment in the city, and he became a taxi driver. He added to the savings the president had given him, and on an abandoned piece of land in Falkensee, in the countryside outside the city, he built a summer bungalow.But in 1989, Dietrich turned 40, the Berlin Wall fell and his Ostmarks became worthless overnight. Three years later, the rightful owners of the land in Falkensee returned from the West to reclaim it.In nearby Oranienburg, where his mother had lived since the 1960s, Dietrich met an elderly lady who was trying to sell a small wooden house down by the canal—an old Wehrmacht barracks she’d lived in since the war. It needed a lot of work, but it was right by the water. Dietrich sold his car and mobile home to buy it and began working on it whenever he could. His girlfriend and Willi, their only son, joined him, and slowly the house came together. By 2005, it was finished—plastered, weatherproofed and insulated, with a garage, a new bathroom and a brick fireplace. Dietrich began living there full-time from May to December and planned to move in permanently when he retired.Bomb exploded at Autobhan 3 near OffenbachLike everyone else in Oranienburg, he knew the city had been bombed during the war, but so had a lot of places in Germany. And parts of Oranienburg were evacuated so frequently that it was easy to believe there couldn’t be many bombs left. Buried bombs had apparently gone off on their own a few times—once, just around the corner from Dietrich’s house, one exploded under the sidewalk where a man was walking his dog. But nobody, not even the dog and its walker, had been seriously injured. Most people simply preferred not to think about it.The state of Brandenburg, however, knew Oranienburg presented a unique problem. Between 1996 and 2007, the local government spent €45 million on bomb disposal—more than any other town in Germany, and more than a third of total statewide expenses for unexploded ordnance during that time. In 2006, the state Ministry of the Interior commissioned Wolfgang Spyra of the Brandenburg University of Technology to determine how many unexploded bombs might remain in the city and where they might be.Frankfurt defuses massive WWII bomb following Germany's biggest evacuation since war era 3 Sep 2017, 11:52amTwo years later, Spyra delivered a 250-page report revealing not only the huge number of time bombs dropped on the city on March 15, 1945, but also the unusually high proportion of them that had failed to go off. That was a function of local geology and the angle at which some bombs hit the ground: Hundreds of them had plunged nose-first into the sandy soil but then had come to rest nose-up, disabling their chemical fuses. Spyra calculated that 326 bombs—or 57 tons of high-explosive ordnance—remained hidden beneath the city’s streets and yards.And the celluloid disks in the bombs’ timing mechanisms had become brittle with age and acutely sensitive to vibration and shock. So bombs had begun to go off spontaneously. A decayed fuse of this type was responsible for the deaths of the three KMBD technicians in Göttingen in 2010. They had dug out the bomb, but weren’t touching it when it went off.image:In January 2013, Paule Dietrich read in the newspaper that the city of Oranienburg was going to start looking for bombs in his neighborhood. He had to fill out some forms, and in July, city contractors arrived. They drilled 38 holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet deep, and dropped a magnetometer into every one. It took two weeks. A month later, they drilled more holes in back of the house. They were zeroing in on something, but didn’t say what.It was nine in the morning on October 7, 2013—the day Dietrich turned 64—when a delegation of city officials arrived at his front gate. “I thought they were here for my birthday,” he said when I met him recently. But that wasn’t it at all. “There’s something here,” the officials told him. “We need to get at it.” They said that it was ein Verdachtspunkt—a point of suspicion. Nobody used the word “bomb.”They marked the spot beside the house with an orange traffic cone and prepared to pump out groundwater from around it. When Dietrich’s friends turned up that afternoon to celebrate his birthday, they took pictures of the cone. Throughout October, the contractors had pumps running round the clock. They started digging at seven every morning and stayed until eight every night. Each morning they drank coffee in Dietrich’s carport. “Paule,” they said, “this will be no problem.”It took them another month to uncover the bomb, more than 12 feet down: 1,000 pounds, big as a man, rusted, its tail stabilizer gone. They shored up the hole with steel plates and chained the bomb so it couldn’t move. Every night, Dietrich stayed in the house with his German shepherd, Rocky. They slept with their heads just a few feet from the hole. “I thought everything was going to be fine,” he said.On November 19, the contractors were drinking coffee as usual when their boss arrived. “Paule, you need to take your dog and get off the property immediately,” he said. “We have to create an exclusion zone right now, all the way from here to the street.”Dietrich took his TV set and his dog and drove over to his girlfriend’s house, in Lehnitz. On the radio, he heard that the city had stopped the trains running over the canal. The KMBD was defusing a bomb. The streets around the house were sealed off. Two days later, on Saturday morning, he heard on the news that the KMBD said the bomb couldn’t be defused; it would have to be detonated. He was walking with Rocky in the forest a mile away when he heard the explosion.Two hours later, when the all-clear siren sounded, Dietrich drove over to his place with a friend and his son. He could barely speak. Where his house had once stood was a crater more than 60 feet across, filled with water and scorched debris. The straw the KMBD had used to contain bomb splinters was scattered everywhere—on the roof of his shed, across his neighbor’s yard. The wreckage of Dietrich’s front porch leaned precariously at the edge of the crater. The mayor, a TV crew and Horst Reinhardt of the KMBD were there. Dietrich wiped away tears. He was less than a year from retirement.image:Paule Dietrich had spent more than ten years renovating his house. (Courtesy Paule Dietrich)Early one morning at the headquarters of the Brandenburg KMBD in Zossen, Reinhardt swept his hand slowly across a display case in his spartan, linoleum-floored office. “These are all American fuses. These are Russian ones, these are English ones. These are German ones,” he said, pausing among the dozens of metal cylinders that filled the case, some topped with small propellers, others cut away to reveal the mechanisms inside. “These are bomb fuses. These are mine fuses. That’s just a tiny fingernail of what’s out there.”RAF Grand SlamAt 63, Reinhardt was in the last few days of his career in bomb disposal and looking forward to gardening, collecting stamps and playing with his grandchildren. He recalled the bomb in Paule Dietrich’s yard, and said his men had had no alternative but to blow it up. Sallow and world-weary, he said it was impossible to tell how long it would take to clear Germany of unexploded ordnance. “There will still be bombs 200 years from now,” he told me. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult. At this point, we’ve dealt with all the open spaces. But now it’s the houses, the factories. We have to look directly underneath the houses.”Late the following day, as the wet wind slapped viciously at the plastic roof overhead, I sat with Paule Dietrich in what had been his carport. A few feet of grass separated it from the spot where his house once stood. The bomb crater had been filled in, and Dietrich was living there in a mobile home. He kept the carport for entertaining, and had equipped it with a fridge, a shower and furniture donated by friends and supporters from Oranienburg, where he has become a minor celebrity.image:Dietrich now uses his former carport to entertain visitors. (Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)Sitting at a small table, Dietrich chain-smoked Chesterfields and drank instant coffee. He produced an orange binder filled with photographs of his former home: as it was when he bought it; when he and his colleagues were decorating it; and, finally, as it was after the bomb had reached the end of its 70-year fuse. Dietrich said he realized that he and his family had been lucky: Every summer, his grandchildren had played in a plastic pool near where the bomb had been lying; at night, they slept in a mobile home beside the pool. “Directly on the bomb,” he said.By the time we met, Dietrich had been offered scant financial compensation by the authorities—technically, the federal government was required to pay only for damage caused by German-made munitions. But among a pile of documents and newspaper clippings he had in the binder was a rendering of the new home he wanted to build on the site. It had once been the best prefabricated bungalow available in East Germany, he said, and a contractor in Falkensee had given him all the components of one, except for the roof. Even so, more than a year after the explosion, he hadn’t started work on it.Outside, in the afternoon gloaming, he showed me why. In the grass at the bottom of the embankment of Lehnitzstrasse was a patch of sandy ground. Men from the city had recently marked it with two painted stakes. They had told him only that it was a “double anomaly,” but he knew precisely what they meant. Paule Dietrich had two more unexploded American bombs at the end of his yard.Nearly 70 years have passed since the last shot was fired marking the end of World War II. But to look at headlines that emerged out of Germany this week, it may comes as a surprise that there are still bombs left behind from the conflict still waiting to go off.Earlier this week, a 550-pound American-made bomb dating back to World War II was intentionally detonated in a controlled burst after its discovery by construction workers in the city of Oranienburg.Although it was a managed explosion, officials still evacuated some 2,500 residents surrounding the blast area. The explosion shattered windows near the site and set roofs ablaze. But thanks to careful planning, the bomb didn't claim any lives.But that's not all. On Thursday, a second bomb that was discovered was also detonated in the same city near the train station. It, too, had to be detonated, because moving the explosive was simply too risky.Though it's uncommon for two WWII-era bombs to be found and detonated in the same city within 24 hours of one another, it should come as no surprise that these explosives are lurking beneath what are now quiet urban or suburban areas. During WWII, when the whole nation was turned into a battlefield, some 22,000 bombs were drilled by the Allies on Oranienburg alone.DNEWS VIDEO: Divers Plumb Depths for U-BoatsSince 1990, when officials first began searching in Germany for unexploded ordinances, more than 130 such weapons have been uncovered. After the war, Germany recovered, but did so unevenly.West Germany enjoyed the support of the Allies from the United States and Western Europe. The country developed into a commercial and industrial force. East Germany lagged behind, however, until the two states were reunited following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, East Germany underwent massive redevelopment efforts to catch up to the West, all funded by German taxpayers. These development efforts can lead to the discovery of unwanted historic artifacts.In some cases, bombs can be moved. In other instances, they have to be detonated because the ordinances are simply too deteriorated and fragile to risk moving them. In the case of the 550-pound bomb, the device was equipped with a chemical trigger instead of a mechanical one, making simple defusal much more risky.As Rose Eveleth writes on the Smithsonian the 550-pound bomb isn't even the largest recent discovery. Last year, German officials discovered a 1.8-ton explosive dropped by the British Royal Air Force during World War II near Koblenz. In that case, however, bomb removal experts defused the device simply by wrenching off the fuse.A bomb after deactivation in downtown Augsburg, Germany on Dec. 25. The nearly 2-ton bomb was dropped on Germany by Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II.Credit: Michaela Rehle/ReutersAn unexploded British bomb from World War II forced 54,000 people out of their homes in Germany on Christmas Day, the country's biggest such evacuation since the end of hostilities.The huge operation on Sunday in the southern city of Augsburg took 11 hours, involved 900 police officers and it ended successfully around 1800 GMT, local authorities announced.The 1.8-ton explosive was found on Tuesday during work at a construction site in the Bavarian city, but authorities waited until Sunday to coordinate the logistics necessary to make it safe.More than 70 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs are regularly found buried on German land, legacies of the intense bombing campaigns by the Allied forces against Nazi Germany.Augsburg, the third-largest city in Bavaria, was targeted several times during the war.A 1,500-meter exclusion zone was created for the operation in case the bomb exploded while engineers were trying to deactivate it and sandbags were set up all around.Two experts defused the explosive, which was described as a "mega bomb" according to police spokesman Manfred Gottschalk cited by DPA news agency.Police checked house by house to ensure they were clear of residents before giving the go ahead.The effort to defuse the bomb only started around 1400 GMT due to a larger than expected number of bedridden or disabled people that had to be removed from the area, said Augsburg mayor Kurt Gribl.About 100 buses and trams were deployed for the evacuation.He had earlier urged "everyone concerned to leave the area, if possible by themselves," in a video message posted on the city's Twitter account.Gribi also called for "each person to verify that their relatives, parents and friends have found places to stay outside the (security) zone... Look out for one another."All clear givenBut pictures later showed the bomb disposal team calmly standing around the cylinder shaped bomb, around two metres long, smiling after their task had ended.Citizens were then given the all clear to return to their homes.Emergency shelters had been set up in schools and gymnasiums to handle those displaced, especially the elderly who had been unable to find accommodation at relatives or friends.Ambulances were called in to transport the infirm to a safe location.Admittedly this was an unusual Christmas day in Augsburg, a city spokesman told TV channel n24, adding that hopefully people would voluntarily leave their homes given the expected "force of the explosion" that could occur during the defusing of the bomb.Bombs are often found during digging work at construction sites.German authorities estimate there are 3,000 sunken bombs in the Berlin area alone.The biggest previous evacuation caused by the dismantling of an unexploded bomb in Germany took place in December 2011 in Koblenz, in the west of the country.Some 45,000 people had to leave their homes on that occasion.Although these latest cases have made headlines, unexploded ordinances are discovered all the time, as the Atlantic's Alexander Abad-Santos notes In fact, some 5,500 bombs discovered in Germany are defused every year, an average of 15 per day. During World War II, the Allies dropped some 2 million tons (or 4 billion pounds) of explosives, with experts estimating that anywhere between 5 and 15 percent did not detonate.World War II Shipwrecks Pose Oil Spill ThreatGermany isn't the only European country dealing with unwanted reminders of a war that took place generations ago. In fact, officials at Amsterdam's Schipol airport, one of the biggest transportation hubs in Europe, had to close down part of the facility following the discovery of WWII US aerial ordnance.And in Poland, a 1.5-ton bomb brought Warsaw to a standstill, according to a Reuters report Unlike the other explosives, this bomb was of Nazi origin, rather than dropped by the Allies.Thankfully, given how much practice bomb defuse teams have had with removing unexploded ordinances dating back to WWII, no injuries or deaths have been reported of late, and property damage has been kept to a minimum.German Bomb disposal unit doing their work, just like another day baking bread.