I had a chance to learn a bit about F# last night at the Caparea.net Users Group meeting. Not really knowing anything about functional programming or F# going into it, I wasn't sure what to expect. Matthew Podwysocki delivered a clear and sometimes deep dive into what functional programming all about, what F# is about, and where functional programming is going. He recommended two books:
1. Programming in Haskell
2. Expert F#
One of the coolest things that he showed last night was how easy it was to program Asynchronous and Parallel functions. The MSDN examples show 3 pages of code and classes. He was able to do it in about a dozen lines of F# code. Very cool.