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it is a failed stories ofPSU losses: Rs 1000000000000 and counting...Do we still need them?There’s this factory that employs 1,200 people. Every day, those people head to the factory, every day they knock off work after their mandatory hours, every month they get paid. In the factory, they make fertiliser. Except, for 12 years, they have not produced any fertiliser of saleable quality. But those 1,200 people still come to the factory, they still put in their hours at work, they still get paid.When we read this, we thought for a moment it was parody. Then wondered if this was a story from the heyday of Communist Russia. And then read again, because this is right here, right now. Well, the story of the fertiliser factory is from 1991, but not too much has changed since then. In his 2002 classic, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, Charles Wheelan, American author and economist, discusses the case of Hindustan Fertiliser Corporation, which had not produced any saleable fertiliser in 12 years or more. “When the government is bankrolling the business, there is no need to produce something and sell it for more than what it cost to make,” wrote Wheelan.In these days, when everyone is a WhatsApp economist, it’s easy to dismiss Wheelan’s critique as American capitalist-speak. Except, Wheelan is the founder of The Centrist Project, a group that funds independent candidates in the U.S. to run for office. Basically, he’s a proponent of neither right-wing nor Left economic ideology. Enough reason to take him seriously.What’s scary about the Hindustan Fertilisers story is that it is not an isolated case. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that more than 100 public sector undertakings, central and state, have been surviving on government largesse for years without producing anything. The roll-call of these PSUs is damning. There’s Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals, the country’s first pharma company, set up in 1902; there’s the ‘timekeepers to the nation’ HMT or Hindustan Machine Tools, which made losses of Rs 121.6 crore; Hindustan Photo Films (HPF) with losses of Rs 2,528 crore... And then there are state-owned enterprises, many of which are also loss-making.To add chaos to the confusion is the fact that of the hundreds of central and state PSUs, only 95 are listed and declare results within the timeframe specified by stock exchanges. The others have no such compulsion, and their financials are declared towards the end of the 18 months allowed by the Registrar of Companies for unlisted companies to declare results.Looking at the latest audited financials (March 2017), there are 93 companies with net losses of Rs 34,618.7 crore. Because of the compliance leeway, it makes sense to add financials from March 2016, which shows 65 PSUs with a combined net loss of Rs 67,734.8 crore. With total PSU losses of Rs 1 lakh crore staring at us, alarm bells ought to be ringing hysterically. To help put that in context, Rs 1 lakh crore is what could fund the government’s ambitious health insurance scheme, which government insiders have taken to call NamoCare. It could also help take care of at least half the recapitalisation of PSU banks. And now let us reiterate that Rs 1 lakh crore plus is what the government is losing every year thanks to PSUs.Can the country afford this steady bleeding? More pertinently, does it have any means to staunch this haemorrhage? If not, would a clean amputation not make more sense? It’s not that these are particularly new questions; for more than a decade, there have been voices against the government getting so involved in business.Ajay Dua, former secretary in the ministry of commerce and industry, is one of those voices. He says the government’s presence in certain critical sectors such as defence, currency, nuclear energy, and areas which have multiple usages like electronic equipment manufacturing both for civil and defence purposes is fine. “Beyond this, the government has no business to be in business,’’ he says.Public sector undertakings today are almost synonymous with losses, bloated workforces, and a casual attitude to productivity. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the early days of independent India, PSUs were seen as the way in which the country could achieve economic prosperity. Not only would they provide employment, they would provide products and services that the nascent private sector could not. Therefore, companies like HMT and HPF.The government of the day also believed that sensitive sectors such as defence, mining, and the like were better kept out of the private sector. It was all in keeping with the socialist nature of the country. For an almost uninterrupted seven decades, the Congress and its allies controlled the government at the centre. The party stayed close to the ideals of Nehruvian socialism, which meant a paternalistic state that controlled most of the means of production while allowing selected private companies to flourish.“Many of these companies have lots of land with them, but selling these assets is not the same thing as selling the business. Moreover, you can’t keep selling the land to keep these dead assets alive.”Neeraj Gupta, secretary, DIPAMBut with the world showing an interest in entering one of the largest markets, it soon became difficult for the government to justify the increasingly unproductive PSUs. Also, as the domestic private sector began to gain muscle, the reason for the existence of many PSUs no longer existed, says Dua. “Now that the private sector has shown its eagerness and capacity to run these sectors it is only natural that the government withdraws from these sectors,’’ he says.The government has many reasons for wanting to keep PSUs alive. There’s the matter of employment; millions of people are employed by PSUs. The flip side to that is that the erstwhile strong labour unions have become huge roadblocks to increasing productivity or, indeed, sale of the PSUs. There’s also the whole issue of nationalism, another of this government’s favourite words. An Indian company, set up by and for the benefit of Indians, should not be allowed to fail, goes one line of thinking.95: Total number of public sector enterprises that are listedThere’s also the matter of money in the form of the hefty dividends paid every year by PSUs to the government. Last year, we had written about how the government seems to view dividends as the gift that keeps on giving. But even the mythical akshaya patra could eventually run dry.“The best time for a strategic sell-off of a PSU is when that unit is still profitable and when it can fetch a decent price, rather than waiting till it turns loss-making.”Shaktikanta Das, former economic affairs secretaryIt’s not that governments haven’t tried; disinvestment has been a word bandied about for decades, and every year, the disinvestment target only grows. The idea was that selling government stake in these crown jewels (variously called navratnas and maharatnas) will boost the country’s bottom line and generally add some heft to its budget.India can take some comfort in knowing it’s not alone in the move to get out of business; globally, 2018 looks like it’s going to be the year of privatisation. Brazil has announced sweeping plans to sell off everything from the mint to the state lottery, to raise revenue and boost infrastructure investment. One of Brazil’s biggest success stories is that of Embraer, which after privatision has become the world’s third largest commercial aircraft maker.“The government should not worry whether the new buyer can run the company, but only ensure that the bidding condition like the welfare of the employees are met.”Prithvi Haldea, founder chairman, Praxis ConsultingSomething similar is happening in France as well. The government there has announced a privatisation drive to raise $11.2 billion to boost industry and innovation. According to a McKinsey report, the French government has stakes in 81 companies, from defence player Safran to carmaker Renault.Russia and China too have made similar privatisation moves. Clearly, India has company.“I believe there is still a market for HMT watches,because of its antique value. How to market them should be the government’s challenge.”Munesh Khanna, former head of investment banking, N.M. Rothschild & SonsThe Indian numbers are depressing, however, making it somewhat difficult to understand how privatisation will pan out here. In 2016-17, maharatna Steel Authority of India (SAIL) incurred a loss of Rs 2,833 crore, despite registering an 8% increase in sales to 13.11 million tonnes, its best so far. Air India doubled its operating profit to Rs 298.03 crore in FY17, but saw its net loss widen to Rs 5,765.2 crore compared to Rs 3,836.8 crore a year earlier. Telecom player Bharat Sanchar Nigam reported reduced losses of Rs 3,879 crore in FY16 (the latest available figure) despite revenue growing by 4.4%.Things are not much different at state-level PSUs. In Maharashtra, out of 87 PSUs, 22 were non-operational; the state government has pumped in Rs 938.9 crore in these closed units. Uttar Pradesh had 39 non-working PSUs, some of which were closed nearly 40 years ago; the government, meanwhile, poured Rs 1,062.3 crore into these till FY16.“Now that the private sector has shown its eagerness and capacity to run these sectors, it is only natural that the government withdraws from these sectors.”Ajay Dua, former secretary, ministry of commerce and industryThe list is depressingly long. Every state has its share of moribund PSUs into which money is still pumped. The reason for such pathetic performance is simple, yet that simplicity can be deceptive.The obvious answer is what the minister of state for heavy industries and public enterprises, Babul Supriyo, recently told the Lok Sabha. “Some common problems for losses in CPSEs include old and obsolete plants and machinery, outdated technology, low capacity utilisation, excess manpower, weak marketing strategies, stiff competition, heavy interest burden, high input cost”... It’s pretty much what economists have been saying for a while.What can the government do now? As far as loss-making PSUs are concerned, the government has only two choices, says Neeraj Gupta, secretary, department of investment and public asset management (DIPAM): liquidate or sell. “Of course, many of these companies have lots of land with them, but selling these assets is not the same thing as selling the business. Moreover, you can’t keep selling the land to keep dead assets alive. It does not really make sense.”There are others who believe that selling a PSU’s assets is a good way forward. Munesh Khanna, former partner at audit and advisory firm PwC and former head of investment banking at N.M. Rothschild & Sons, says there are many ways to make money from lossmaking PSUs. “HMT has so much land that it can be used to create a smart city,” he says.The government clearly agrees. In late December, the cabinet decided to sell the excess land owned by Bengal Chemicals to “meet the outstanding liabilities and implement the voluntary retirement benefits to its employees”.Like Gupta, Khanna also says that not all PSU businesses need to be sold, even if land and other assets go. The government, he says, needs to think of innovative ways to revive iconic companies. “I believe there is still a market for HMT watches because of its antique value. How to market them should be the government’s challenge,” he says.Kiishore Soni, founder of Kishore Soni & Co, a New Delhi-based accounting firm which deals in corporate restructuring, is one of those who isn’t sure selling the business is even possible. “Once a factory is closed, the only thing that is left is the land and the boundary wall of the company. All other assets would be only on the books because every valuable part of the machinery, if it has not disappeared already, would have been stolen by someone or the other.”The government, meanwhile, is still thinking of selling PSUs, and has tasked think-tank NITI Aayog to provide a roadmap for strategic sell-offs. That body has come up with a blueprint to sell 74 loss-making PSUs. The total budgetary support provided to these 74 units just from 2004-16 was to the tune of Rs 53,772 crore; despite that, they still had losses of Rs 33,960 crore on their books (63% of the total budgetary support).76: Number of PSUs that are not functioning or yet to start functioning.However, selling a PSU is far easier said than done. Considering the losses that the majority of these companies report, will there be any buyers? Former economic affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das points out that the best time for a “strategic sell-off of a public sector unit is when that unit is still profitable and when it can fetch a decent price, rather than wait till it turns loss-making”.Prithvi Haldea, founder chairman of Praxis Consulting and Information Services, the go to person when it comes to public issues, could not agree more. He points to PSUs like ONGC and GAIL, saying that what is profitable today can turn loss-making tomorrow like SAIL.More important, Haldea says that disinvestment that is practiced in India—one PSU buying shares of the other—is not necessarily a good idea. “After all, the government—whether state or centre—will continue to be de facto promoter of these companies, run them in its own way on the taxpayer’s money.”If the government wants to hang on to certain sectors, says Dua, it needs to behave like an investor. Ideally, this means it should let an independent board and professional management run the show and pay for their own mistakes. He explains that the French government adopted this strategy with great success, citing the example of power major Areva. Despite owning a stake in the company, when Areva realised some months later that it had miscalculated the cost of setting up a nuclear plant in Finland by as much as €2.8 billion, the government did not intervene. Areva had no choice but to sell its transmission and distribution subsidiary, Areva T&D, to pay off the losses.Brazil took a different path when it privatised Embraer. The government retained what it calls a ‘golden share’; that’s one share, but one that gives the government veto over certain sensitive projects.These international precedents could help, but unfortunately, the government here has to contend with a host of issues peculiar to PSUs, including the role of labour unions. In the Bengal Chemicals case, for instance, the union approached the Calcutta High Court and got a stay order on the sale of land. This despite the fact that the proceeds from the sale were intended to pay employees.Assuming that the government can overcome such problems, how can it conduct a sale in a way that benefits all stakeholders? Experts are divided on this. Haldea believes the government should enact a law to explain the reasons for continuing in certain industries. Others say a policy document is enough; formulating legal tenders could be needlessly time consuming.Owning PSUs like KIOCL, formerly Kudremukh IronOre Company, gives the government some control over natural resources.So what should be the process of a correct strategic sell-off so that questions of impropriety/connivance with a bidder are not raised later? The trick is to design a transparent process of bidding, both for domestic and international bidders. To get a bit technical, the beginning can be to draw up a standard template which provides complete details of the bidding process, those who can and those who can’t participate (some foreign bidders or defaulters); set bidding conditions; and, most important, set stringent penalties for those who violate the terms of the bidding process.Shaktikanta Das adds that the bidders’ technical and financial competence should be tested before a company is sold off to either a foreign or an Indian private player.Most of the experts we spoke to say the proceeds of any strategic sell-off should be put in an escrow or separate account intended to safeguard employees’ financial interests. “It is imperative that the government keeps its commitment, whether in terms of paying the voluntary retirement scheme or the compensation package worked out in conjunction with workers, because many workers may suddenly find themselves out of a job,’’ says Haldea.Putting the proceeds of the sell-off in an escrow account is not always the best answer, feel others. As long as the employees are given their due share, the money can also be used to repay more expensive loans or used in whatever way the government wants.While some believe that setting a floor price—the minimum amount that bidders must fork out for any asset—could keep many bidders away, Dua believes that a minimum price is important to keep all controversies at bay. “While investment bankers doing the road show could set the floor price, other investment firms can be roped in to authenticate the price,’’ says Kaushik Dutta, founder director of New Delhi-based think-tank Thought Arbitrage. He was involved in a number of strategic sell-offs during the earlier BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government.Again, to ensure complete transparency in the bidding process, a well-qualified team should to be set up to answer all queries from bidders but only online. The government should also set a time for the bids to come in. And the time and day should be announced for bid opening and announcement of the winner. And finally, there should be stiff penalties, which can include personal or bank guarantees that can be invoked by the government, in case the winner fails to honour the bid.Lastly, as Haldea points out, the government needs to come out with a couple of pilot projects first because there can be a number of imponderables that might not have been factored in. “Once the problems and pitfalls are identified, the government can go full-scale ahead with its strategic sell-off plan.”While devising a generous compensation package, it is important to keep in mind several factors regarding employees—including the number of years in service, position in the company, number of dependents in the family etc—because it will generate a lot of discontent and give an opportunity to the union and the workers to take legal action.The more important part is actually finding the right buyer. Das says non-functioning companies can be sold to any bidder because the value then lies in the real estate it holds. He says the government can use the proceeds more fruitfully. However, he adds, functioning companies, loss-making or otherwise, should be sold only to those bidders who have an interest in that business. “You can only sell the airline business to another airline. One has to keep both business and the employees’ interest in mind. Otherwise the government itself can use the real estate of these units to set up schools, colleges, hospitals and for other infrastructure purposes.”In fact, even in the case of loss-making enterprises, Haldea argues that, “the government should not worry whether the new buyer can run the company, but only ensure that the bidding condition like the welfare of the employees are met’.’ The idea is to get rid of the deteriorating asset at an early date—with every passing day loss-making companies lose value—and hence setting stringent conditions, will only lead to a corresponding decline in the value of the assets and less monetary benefits for the government.The only way to sell loss-making but functional companies is to waive unsecured loans like debentures, for instance, or convert them into equity for new buyers. “More importantly, it will also have to waive-off all the accumulated interest on the principal amount. Therefore, the government even in most optimistic terms will have to take a 50% to 60% haircut on the principal amount,” says SoniThe question now is whether strategic sell-offs will actually happen in India. Government officials seem most hopeful not only because of the repeated rhetoric by the prime minister and the finance minister about the need to privatise these loss-making units, but also because of the number of measures already taken in the past couple of years. These include sweetening the VRS package—it will be based on the 2007 pay scales; all dues and salary arrears will be settled at the time of separation. Moreover, a number of ailing CPSEs like PEC, Bharat Wagon & Engineering, Hindustan Machine Tools, and Bharat Pumps and Compressors have already been identified, for closure.Getting rid of these units and restructuring the more viable ones would not only plug leakage of public funds but also help the government redeploy scarce managerial talent and money in more viable enterprises; provide higher social security outlays for the poor and the underprivileged, but also set right the infrastructural bottlenecks that have been a big hindrance in India’s growth story.(The article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of the Fortune India magazine. )

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.

How to Write a Cover LetterCover letters. As much as they require more work, cover letters are a great opportunity to cover qualifications we can’t fully explain in our resumes. In addition, they help personalize job applicants to enable them to come across more as real people to potential employers. If you throw together a cover letter in the hopes that nobody will actually read it, you might be missing a chance to land the job. To take advantage of a cover letter's full potential, follow these steps below. You’ll find advice on formatting, reviewing, and researching cover letters. You will also find links to three free samples, which you can copy and adapt to your own personal cover letter.Method One of Four:Write an Email Cover LetterInclude a salutation. There are a number of cover letters to choose from. And, the greeting you choose will depend on how much information you have about the company.If you know the name of the hiring manager, your salutation should be something like "Dear [insert name]" followed by either a comma or a colon. Make sure to address the manager formally using their proper title (Mr., Ms., Dr., etc.).If you don't know the name of the hiring manager, consider addressing your letter "Dear Hiring Manager," "Dear Recruiting Team," or "Dear [insert company name] Team."As a last resort, address the letter "To whom it may concern," though we recommend avoiding this salutation, as it could come across as a template letter.Write the first paragraph of your letter. This is where you will mention the job for which you're applying and how you found the job listing. It only needs to be 1 to 2 sentences in length.Write the body paragraphs of your letter. Most cover letters will only have 1 or 2 body paragraphs. You don't want to overwhelm the hiring manager or use up a great deal of their time. Try to answer the following questions in your body paragraphs:Why am I a qualified candidate for this position?What work experience do I have that fits the job requirements in the company's listing?Why do I want to work for this company specifically?Write the final paragraph of your letter. This will be where you wrap up and discuss how you will proceed with the application. Consider including the following:Reiterate in one sentence why you feel you're a perfect fit for the position.Discuss what you'll do next. If you plan on following up with the hiring manager in a week or two, include a specific date. Otherwise, just say that you look forward to interviewing for the position and discussing your qualifications further.Provide your contact information. Include your email address and your phone number so the hiring manager can get in touch with you.Mention that your resume or references are attached (if applicable).Thank the person for their time.End your cover letter with a respectful closing statement. "Best" or "Sincerely" are both classic options. Also, since you won't be able to sign your email, finish the letter by typing your full name.AdvertisementMethod Two of Four:Write a Paper Cover LetterAdd a letterhead at the top of the letter. Your letterhead should include your full name, address, telephone number, and email address. Some guidelines to follow when creating your letterhead:Your name should be in bold 14- or 16-point font.Your address and other contact information should be in normal 12-point font.The font of your letterhead does not need to be Arial or Times New Roman, like the rest of your letter, but it should be professional looking and easy to read. The most important thing to remember is to include up-to-date information so that you make it easy for the employer to contact you.You may want to include an extra line under the letterhead to create visual appeal and to separate the letterhead from the rest of the letter.Write the recipient’s name, address, and the date below the letterhead. It doesn't matter whether you put the date first or last, or how many blank lines you include between them, as long as it looks professional.From here on out, use 12-point Arial or Times New Roman throughout the entire letter, set your margins to one inch, and use single spacing. Be sure your font is black, and if you're printing your letter out, use standard-sized paper (8 1/2” by 11”).Address the recipient. Be sure to refer to the recipient by his or her proper title (Mrs., Mr., Dr., etc.). If you’re not sure who the recipient is, write, “To Whom It May Concern:” or “Dear Sir or Madam”; however, it is always best to address a cover letter to a real person to make it look like you’re not sending form letters.State your purpose in the first paragraph. Tell the employer why you are writing to them in two or three sentences. State the position for which you are applying (or the one you would like to have should it become available).You don't necessarily need to include how you became aware of the position unless it was through a mutual contact or recruiting program—in which case you should make the most of the connection.If you are writing a letter of interest (also known as a prospecting or inquiry letter) in which you are asking about positions that might be available, specify why you are interested in working for the employer.Outline your qualifications in the middle paragraph(s). Make sure to match them to the requirements of the position. If you are writing to inquire about open positions, tell the employer how you can contribute to their bottom line, not what you want to get out of the deal. To do this, use what you have researched about the employer's background and history.Make your qualifications jump out at the reader by researching the company to which you are applying for a job and tailoring your letter accordingly. This will also be useful if you get an interview. Some questions to keep in mind as you write areWhat is the employer's mission? What do they promote as the one thing that sets them apart from their competitors?What kind of customer base does the employer have? Who is their target audience?What is the company's history? Who founded it? How has the business evolved? What are the main highlights of the company's performance over the past few years?Include a positive statement or question in the final paragraph that will motivate the employer to contact you. Make this closing paragraph between two to four sentences. Direct the employer to your enclosed resume and make sure you specify that you're available for an interview. Finish off by thanking the recruiter for their time and consideration, and welcome them to get in touch with you to continue the conversation.Write an appropriate closing. It’s a good idea to thank the reader for his or her time. After that, write “Sincerely,” “Respectfully,” or “Regards,” leave several spaces, and print your name.Add your signature. If you will be submitting your cover letter digitally, it’s a good idea to scan and add your signature, write it in with a digital writing pad, or make a digital signature stamp with appropriate software.Make a notation of the enclosures. If you enclose something, such as a resume, with a letter, you should indicate that the letter contains enclosures by making the notation “Enclosure” or “Enclosures” at the bottom of the letter.AdvertisementMethod Three of Four:Review Your Cover LetterSpell-check and proofread. If you have a spell-check feature, use it. Some programs, such as Microsoft Word, also include a grammar check that you should use. Proofread your letter yourself. Some things to avoid areCommon misspellings.Writing in the passive voice. Own your accomplishments. Stay away from phrases like "This experience gave me the opportunity to...," or worse, "these goals were met by me." You don't want to sound like everything happened to you or that it was done by some other entity. Make yourself the active subject of every sentence (e.g., "In this role, I developed/reinforced/learned/etc."). However, this does not imply that every sentence should start with "I..." so vary your syntax accordingly.Colloquial (informal) writing. You want to sound professional and educated. Avoid all forms of slang, unnecessary abbreviations, and texting lingo.Incorrect punctuation.Read your letter aloud to hear how it reads. Do not rely on the spelling and grammar checks to catch mistakes. Consider asking a friend, or even two, to proofread your letter as well. If no one is available to help, another good strategy is to spend some time away from your final draft (a few hours or even a whole day) so that you can return to it with a fresh perspective.AdvertisementMethod Four of Four:Checklist for Preparing Your Cover LetterDouble-check some of the most-overlooked basics before you do anything. While misspelling or misidentifying the name of the company you're applying to isn't the end of the world, it's not exactly starting off on the right foot. Double-check the following:The complete name of the company to which you are applying for a jobThe name of the person to whom you are addressing the cover letterThe address of the person to whom you are sending the letterThe title of the job for which you are applying and/or its reference number, if it existsAsk yourself what skills do you possess that you are not using enough in your current role. Would the ideal candidate for this new role be required to make more use of those types of skills? What opportunities are missing in your current role? Answering these questions will help you explain why you are interested in leaving current position. For example, are you looking for:"room for advancement""an opportunity to learn new skills"Hammer down your current job or educational position. This may seem like an obvious question, but knowing how to clearly define your current role is a tremendous asset. For example, you could be a:"graduate student in environmental science""customer service professional specializing in the high-end retail market"Provide a general description of your accomplishments/experiences in the field to which you are applying. For example, you could have:"fifteen years of excellent customer service experience""an outstanding background in scientific research and discovery""a solid history of dependability in the automotive industry"Identify the assets can you offer to the company to which you are applying. List a few in your cover letter, such as:"extensive experience with start-ups""demonstrated ability to solve problems""refined ability to manage teams"What will you help the company accomplish, if given the job you desire?"increase its bottom line""meet its goal of providing only the best in customer service""expand its customer base and increase its revenue"Specify the type of job or level of the position you are seeking. Is it:"entry-level""management""senior levelSource : wikihow.com