Wednesday, 19 September 2007

Functional programming in industry

Microsoft's recent decision to make F# one of its mainstream programming languages for Visual Studio will increase the acceptance of modern functional programming languages for ordinary industrial development. In the mean time, it is interesting to see where functional programming languages are already being used in industry.

Perhaps the most common functional programming language in industry is JavaScript, used to power many of the world's websites.

Flying Frog Consultancy are a consultancy, book and software company specializing in the ML family of languages, primarily OCaml and F#. We have product lines including books and on-line magazines teaching OCaml and F# as well as software written in or for these languages.

Microsoft have a considerable investment in the CAML family of functional programming languages. Specifically the OCaml language and Microsoft's own CAML-derivative for .NET called F#. Microsoft's driver verification software is written in OCaml. Microsoft trust the $2bn advertising market on MSN Live to F# code. Microsoft's XBox group write F# programs to analyze the statistics of on-line XBox Live players. Many Microsoft Research projects are written in OCaml and F#, such as the Stochastic Pi Machine (SPiM).



MATLAB from The MathWorks uses the FFTW library to provide its FFT implementation. FFTW is written in OCaml.

XenSource's value-add over the free edition of Xen is largely a distributed, cross-platform, multi-programming-language management tool stack written in OCaml. XenSource recently sold to Citrix for $500M.

Jane St. Capital have over 20 functional programmers working in offices around the world on finance using OCaml. They recently expanded with a new office in London. Several other financial houses use functional programming languages extensively. Outside ML, Haskell is also popular in the financial sector following a seminal paper by Simon Peyton-Jones.





Wink Technologies provide a people search engine written largely in OCaml.


Credit Suisse First Boston use Haskell in finance.

Linspire is a commercial Linux distribution written partly in Haskell.

Erlang is used extensively by Ericsson for handling telecoms and has recently become trendy in industry.

1 comment:

Hindi mp3 songs said...

A-1 Custom Plastic Extrusion specializes in extruded tubing including polyurethane tubing, polypropylene tubing, polyethylene tubing and etc. Agricultural and dairy tubing. Extruded profiles, HDPE and LDPE. Quality extrusion that is made in the USA.

Custom Plastic Extrusion and Extruded Tubing

Custom Plastic Extrusion and Extruded Tubing