It’s been a great year for F# with the blossoming of the fsharp.org working groups. It’s been amazing watching the community come together to form a movement outside of Microsoft. This is most certainly the long term future of F#, protected from the whims of layer upon layer of management. Who knows, in the coming year we might even see community contributions to the F# Core libraries. Who would have thought that would ever have been possible?

I’m very happy to see that Sergey Tihon has maintained his wonderful weekly roundup of F# community goings on. It’s a big time investment week after week to keep the weekly news going. After leaving Atalasoft, and no longer being paid to blog on a regular basis, I found I couldn’t keep investing the time and felt very badly about not being able to continue my own weekly roundups. Sergey has picked up that mantle with a passion, and I’m so very glad for this extremely useful service he provides to the community.

Meanwhile Howard Mansell and Tomas Petricek (at his BlueMountain sabbatical), worked toward building a bunch of great new tools for data science in F#. The R Type Provider has become extremely polished and while Deedle may be fresh out of the oven, it already rivals pandas in its ability to easily manipulate data.

At Bayard Rock Paulmichael Blasucci, Peter Rosconi, and I have been working on a few small community contributions as well. iFSharp Notebook (An F# Kernel for iPython Notebook) is in a working and useful state, but is still missing intellisense and type information as the iPython API wasn’t really designed with that kind of interaction in mind. The Matlab Type Provider is also in a working state, but still missing some features (I would love to have some community contributions if anyone is interested). Also in the works is a nice set of F# bindings for the ACE Editor, I’m hoping we can release those early next year.

Finally, I wanted to mention what a great time I had at both the F# Tutorials both in London and in NYC this year. I also must say that the London F# culture is just fantastic; Phil is a thoughtful and warm community organizer and it shows in his community. I’ve been a bit lax in my bloggings but they were truly both wonderful events and are getting better with each passing year.

That right there was the highlight of my year. Just look at all of those smiling functional programmers.