# Sun Microsystems and Microsoft battling again…
[programming language talk:]
Sun Microsystems are the guys behind Java, and the Microsoft team developed C#.
Java and C# have always been in battle for users, the two languages look very similar and act very similar, they do have their differences but they are targeted at the same kinds of developers.
Now they are at it again!
For a few years now Sun Microsystems have been developing something called Fortress, which is an object oriented high performance functional programming language that is partly based on Fortran but has more in common with Scheme and Haskell. It can run on the Java Virtual Machine. More details here: https://fortress.sunsource.net/
Now, all of a sudden Microsoft have release F#, which is an object oriented high performance functional programming language that is partly based on Fortran and MATLAB, but has more in common with Scheme and OCaml. It can run on the .Net virtual machine. More details here: https://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx
You’ll find that the Fortress system is actually Free and Open Source Software, and will be able to run on Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix. F# seems like its just a windows thing, especially as it only runs on .net, I suppose us on the other systems would have to wait until its on mono. F# is also closed source.
Microsoft really do get on my nerves, they really know how to irritate people. I bet Sun aren’t happy with Fortran being basically copied by Microsoft to make this F# language. Sorry everybody, I am on Sun Microsystems side at the moment.
So the battles continue:
- Java Versus C#
- Fortress Versus F#
Technorati Tags: fortress, F#, sun, microsoft, functional, fortran
November 14th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
F# already works on Mono, and applications built with it do run on Mono.
We have been in touch for a while with the F# developers in public forums about how to improve our support for it (performance, startup, packaging).
You are correct that F# today is a proprietary language, I wish that was different.
Historically speaking though, F# has been under development for many years. And its implementation had a strong influence on .NET 2.0 and C# 2.0 (generics support on the CLI VM came directly from the lead researcher that created F#: Don Syme).
Don has been blogging about F# since January of 2005 when it was originally released to the public (the 1.0 release), it really was not a product, but a research prototype.
You can read about the motivations for F# in papers from September 2001 when the foundation for what would become generics was being discussed as “ILX”.
https://research.microsoft.com/~dsyme/publications.aspx
Miguel.
November 14th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
One last thing, am not sure that Fortress and F# are languages on the same space. F# is a functional language that traces its roots back to OCaml, while Fortress is a language for designed for high performance computing.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Hi Miguel,
First of all many thanks for the comments, especially from a mono perspective. I am also very glad to here that it is in Mono.
You may be right about F# being a little bit earlier, I don’t have the dates of when Fortress was conceived.
As for not sure of being in the same space, they may not be exactly in the same space but they are overlapping quite a lot. Sun’s Fortress is most definitely functional and object oriented (Fortress tutorial available here: https://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf )), and I have heard that F# is going to be targeted at the high-performance developers (wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_programming_language (14th November 2007)).
I will be very interesting to see what happens in the future of these languages.
Once again, many thanks for the comment.
Daniel
November 17th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
What do you mean by F# being “partly based on Fortran and MATLAB”? I do not see Fortran and Matlab anywhere.
MS stole OCaml and embedded it into DotNet. That’s what it is. You get OCaml syntax and core semantics and you can use DotNet libraries. Which is nice because OCaml is not as well integrated into GUI, DB and Web. However, they forget to mention OCaml, which is not nice.
Amen.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I think that a much more interesting functional language on JVM is Scala. It is more comparable to F# on DotNet. Scala’s syntax is actually very close to that of Java. So learning it for Java people will be easy.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
A link to the Scala functional/OO language which runs on JVM:
https://www.scala-lang.org
I think it is really promissing.