F# 2014 – A Retrospective and Call to Action

I have the privilege of being allowed to write the final post for the F# Advent Calendar in English. To celebrate, I thought I’d skip a technical post and end the year, and the Advent Calendar, with a brief, personal look back on 2014 and the wonderful time I’ve had within the F# community over this past year.

I fondly remember sitting in a room with a few dedicated F# enthusiasts back in November of 2013. The passion for F# and excitement with seeing its steady growth was addictive. Nobody in the room could avoid being excited as Mathias proposed to make 2014 be “the year of F#.” The community was energized. Little did I realize, at that point, how prophetic that simple statement would become.

This year has been an amazing year for F#. This community astounds me on a regular basis, and this year has surpassed all concepts of expectations I held previously. While I won’t even attempt to list all of the highlights, some of my personal favorite events this year have included:

• Visual F# Tools accepting pull requests and then even releasing an out of band release with community contributions
• Xamarin 3 including “F# Awesomeness” in all downloads of Xamarin Studio
• IntelliFactory releasing WebSharper 3 under an Apache 2.0 license
• The announcement of an open sourced .NET Core
• The community working together to create a new F# logo
• Entire “F# tracks” at many conferences with numerous speakers
• A community driven push towards F# 4.0, with a large list of contributors
• Intense open source contributions in the F# ecosystem – with consistent improvements throughout the year, and some projects getting over 200 commits in a single week!
• New F# User Groups being created around the world, with more speakers, talks, and topics than ever before
• Too many other things to list, including wonderful blog posts, two F# Advent calendars - in English and in Japanese, an active F# chat room, new coding dojos, and more…

I am thankful to everybody in the F# community. Thank you for a wonderful year. It has been my honor and my pleasure to work with many of you. I’ve met wonderful new colleagues, and look forward to meeting many more of you in the upcoming year.

Which brings me to my personal favorite F# event of the year – legally forming the F# Software Foundation. Late in the year, a group of dedicated community members helped move the F# Software Foundation (FSSF) from an informal organization to a legally established entity, and are diligently working to make the FSSF the organization the F# community deserves. I still feel honored to be a part of this endeavor, and am dedicated to helping in any and every way possible moving forward.

Yesterday, we announced the new membership site, where anybody can join the FSSF and become a member. We immediately had people signing up, and we have been receiving very positive feedback on everything being done with FSSF.

I’d like to propose that everybody in the community, whether you’ve been using F# for years or minutes, to join me in a call to action.

Join the F# Software Foundation.

The F# Software Foundation can only ever be as good as its membership. I encourage anybody with an interest in F# to join as a member, and share your ideas for the F# Software Foundation.

• If you’re a dedicated member of the F# community, hopefully your name is already on the member roster. If not, it only takes a few minutes to be listed.
• Are you a Scala developer who is interested to see what’s happening in the newly opened source .NET world? Join our community.
• Are you a C# developer in love with LINQ who might like to learn more functional programming? Join our community and see what F# has to offer.
• Are you a JavaScript developer who’d love to see how type safety via WebSharper or FunScript could change the way you think about programming? Join our community.
• Would you like to work with data from multiple sources, with type safety and IDE integration? Investigate type providers and join our community.
• Everybody is welcome and encouraged to become a member. If you agree with the Mission of the FSSF, join us!

2014 has been an amazing year for F# –

Let’s roll out the end of the year with a shower of new members, and make 2015 even better!