I’m still thinking about teaching F# to my fellow coworkers later this year. In order to do that, I’ve had to start thinking about what to teach.

This class is a tough assignment for me. The people who want to take it have said, “No parsing!” evidently, parsing is for eggheads and dorks (Fuller is such a reactionary anti-academic). And I have to make it useful! Fine. My thesis is this; F# is best when used for libraries, when used for asynchronous programming and reactive manipulation of streams. Also, functional abstractions and immutability are great for data-centric programming.

Below is my rough syllabus. Please feel free to comment if you think something is missing. It almost surely is.

• Week one – Making sure you have F#, Basic Syntax, type inference, recursion. There will be a reading assignment to accompany this. In addition, I’ll have a github project up that will have some tests that need to pass. I’m calling these “worksheet” problems.
• Week two – Pattern matching, higher order functions, maps and folds. A few worksheet problems added to github. A game of life mini-project assignment?
• Week three – Algebreaic types, records. In addition, we will start dealing with tail-calls and branching recursion. Worksheets.
• Week four – Streams and Sequences. These are kind of what functional programming is about, to my mind at least. It will allow spring boarding to reactive (eventually). They will write a few streams in worksheets.
• Week five – Modules, Objects, and Mutable refs. We’ll write a lib that will be used by a CLR program to do the “Flocking Birds”
• Week six – Asynchronous Workflows. We’ll write a command line podcatcher that will be totally asynchronous, list of urls in a file spits out to RSS feeds, to saved mp3 files.
• Week seven – Mailboxes. A simple Spreadsheet (parser provided) will allow gets to happen threadsafe from the updates. A worksheet with some massive parallel updates of a queue where everything must be handled thread safe.
• Week eight & nine – Custom Workflows. You know… Monads. May take a couple weeks. Still no damn idea what I’m doing here, honestly. I need some workflow examples to implement.
• Week ten – Reactive Programming. We’ll write a generative seqencer that uses a WPF control and a sound lib I’ll provide.
• Week eleven – back to C#. A view of linq and lambdas.
• Week twelve – Topics in F#. Lightning talks! And a fluid simulation project. IN 3D! Again, I’ll provide the control.

Oh, theres so much to be fleshed out, but here is where I’m thinking of starting.

And I need to do the projects to make sure they are sized right.