The San Francisco Bay Area F# User Group

F# for Python Developers

March 7, 2011 · 6:30 PM
Microsoft

Both Python and F# are cross-platform, open source languages which have similarities in mindset and syntax. If you enjoy programming in the functional style in Python, you'll feel at home with F#. If you don't know Python, you'll still benefit from this talk because it'll be a good introduction to F#.

For those new to F#, in a nutshell it's a functional programming language from the ML family of languages. It runs on OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and the Xbox. It gives you performance and safety from being statically typed, yet has a clean and simple syntax. Tooling support is excellent. Extensive libraries exist for just about any kind of situation, and true multithreaded programming is supported.

About the speaker: A Principal Scientist at Amyris Biotechnologies, Darren Platt has had a pivotal role in many Bay Area bioinformatics organizations. He was Senior Director of Research at 23andMe, a leader in direct to consumer genetic testing. He was head of Bioinformatics at the Joint Genome Institute where his novel DNA assembly algorithms enabled work on the Neanderthal genome, among others. Darren was a founding member of the Bioinformatics group at Exelixis which pioneered the gene discovery and analysis software industry.

He is also an author of the Forge DNA assembly algorithm which combines Sanger and "next generation" sequence data to assemble genomes de novo.

Note: After 6pm, ask the security guard to let you up to the 7th floor. Follow the signs after that.

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A former member

It was a great meeting and great to chat with other members.

0 · March 11, 2011
Jack Fox

Darren Platt’s well-organized lecture was a great introduction to F# for those familiar with Python, and provided a peek into the Python world for those familiar with F#. He hit all the high points of functional programming with F#, provided links to lots of good resources for getting started in F# (I can vouch for http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_... being a great place to start), and walked through some very interesting code examples to whet the appetite of newbies. He only covered a fraction of his longer introductory presentation, and it was enlightening even for those a little more familiar with F#. He stuck around after the presentation for some interesting conversations with the audience. I can honestly say after this meet-up I can better articulate in my own mind what makes functional programming special.

0 · March 9, 2011
Paul Keister

Great presenter, great audience, great topic! Good F# examples and interesting to hear how a Python developer views the F# stack.

0 · March 8, 2011
Paul House

For me it was a great introduction to F# and how it might be used in bioinformatics.

0 · March 8, 2011
Homi

Great introduction to F#!
Very knowledgeable presenter.

0 · March 8, 2011