Attempting to create an intelligent entry about Linux for such a wide ranging audience is a bit like trying to compare a presentation on quantum mechanics for physicists while being readable by somebody with a junior high school education.

If you are a *NIX expert, then I suggest you keep on reading so you know how to explain this world to mere mortals.

I called it *nix for a reason. It represents a family of thinking. It is not unlike the difference between the language C and C++. Are there differences between the two? Certainly. And it is not like the difference between COBOL and C.

Years ago when I ran my own vo-tech school I would teach the students there are only two things in life. MS and *NIX. A friend of mine, a genius developer in her own right was aghast.

There are normally two sides to the story when it comes to employment. On one hand, employers hold the view that the right candidate is a hard find; while on the other, job hunters think that it’s a tasking affair to land a decent job out there.

Regardless of which side of the divide you lay, landing good work or workers is a tedious endeavor. For those looking to hire, a single job opening could attract hundreds or thousands of applicants. Sifting through the lot in hope of finding the right fit is no doubt time consuming. Conversely, a job seeker may hold the opinion that he or she is submitting resumes into the big black hole of the Internet, never really anticipating a response, but nevertheless sending them out rather than sit back doing nothing.

A recruitment agency normally keeps an internal database of applicants and resumes for current and future opportunities. They first do a database search to try and identify qualified and screened candidates from their existing crop of talent. Most often the case, they’ll also post open positions online through industry websites and job boards so as to net other possible applicants.

When it comes to IT staffing needs, HR managers even find a more challenging process in their hands. This is because the IT department is one of the most sensitive in any given organization where a single slip-up could be disastrous for the company (think data security, think finances when the IT guys are working in tandem with accounts). You get the picture, right?

It is said that spoken languages shape thoughts by their inclusion and exclusion of concepts, and by structuring them in different ways. Similarly, programming languages shape solutions by making some tasks easier and others less aesthetic. Using F# instead of C# reshapes software projects in ways that prefer certain development styles and outcomes, changing what is possible and how it is achieved.

F# is a functional language from Microsoft's research division. While once relegated to the land of impractical academia, the principles espoused by functional programming are beginning to garner mainstream appeal.

As its name implies, functions are first-class citizens in functional programming. Blocks of code can be stored in variables, passed to other functions, and infinitely composed into higher-order functions, encouraging cleaner abstractions and easier testing. While it has long been possible to store and pass code, F#'s clean syntax for higher-order functions encourages them as a solution to any problem seeking an abstraction.

F# also encourages immutability. Instead of maintaining state in variables, functional programming with F# models programs as a series of functions converting inputs to outputs. While this introduces complications for those used to imperative styles, the benefits of immutability mesh well with many current developments best practices.

For instance, if functions are pure, handling only immutable data and exhibiting no side effects, then testing is vastly simplified. It is very easy to test that a specific block of code always returns the same value given the same inputs, and by modeling code as a series of immutable functions, it becomes possible to gain a deep and highly precise set of guarantees that software will behave exactly as written.

Further, if execution flow is exclusively a matter of routing function inputs to outputs, then concurrency is vastly simplified. By shifting away from mutable state to immutable functions, the need for locks and semaphores is vastly reduced if not entirely eliminated, and multi-processor development is almost effortless in many cases.

Type inference is another powerful feature of many functional languages. It is often unnecessary to specify argument and return types, since any modern compiler can infer them automatically. F# brings this feature to most areas of the language, making F# feel less like a statically-typed language and more like Ruby or Python. F# also eliminates noise like braces, explicit returns, and other bits of ceremony that make languages feel cumbersome.

Functional programming with F# makes it possible to write concise, easily testable code that is simpler to parallelize and reason about. However, strict functional styles often require imperative developers to learn new ways of thinking that are not as intuitive. Fortunately, F# makes it possible to incrementally change habits over time. Thanks to its hybrid object-oriented and functional nature, and its clean interoperability with the .net platform, F# developers can gradually shift to a more functional mindset while still using the algorithms and libraries with which they are most familiar.

Related F# Resources:

F# Programming Essentials Training

As developers we are overwhelmed with the number of language choices made available to us. It wasn't so long ago that C and it's object oriented sibling C++ where the mainstay of any programmer. Now though we have languages which make certain tasks so easy and simple that we simply cannot afford to ignore them.

In this article we are going to look at the overall differences between Python, Perl and TCL. All formidable and worthy in their own right, but each one has been designed to suit a specific programming need.

1)– Perl is the most mature out of the three languages we are looking at in this article. It was originally designed for processing textual data, and it does so extremely well. Of course Perl has grown over time and can be used for a multitude of different programming scenarios.