F# becomes open source

The F# development team at Microsoft Research made a great announcement just a few days ago: the F# compiler and the class library will become open source. This allows others to improve the language, but on the other hand, the F# will still be an integral part of Visual Studio.

Says the announcement: "we have a clear vision for F#, indeed a ground-breaking one, and are investing in it, and we are deeply committed to shipping F# ‘in the box'. That is the real focus of F#: a quality experience of functional programming in Visual Studio, and that is what our team are driven to achieve and what we live for."

This sounds very good to me. Even with the announcement, the best place to get started with functional programming in .NET and Visual Studio is fsharp.net.