Happy F# Day!

I’ve been thinking for a while that F# needs a “birthday” that we can celebrate as a community.

Of course, like any long term project, there is rarely a single date that you can point to as a birthday. Even the 4th of July and the Queen’s birthday are not as straightforward as they seem.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to celebrate a date, even if it’s not accurate!

So what date would best symbolize the “birth” of F#? As far as I can tell, there was no “big bang” for the early releases of F#, including F# 1.0.

But five years ago, on April 12, F# 2.0 was released fully integrated with Visual Studio 2010. And for the first time, a high quality statically-typed functional programming language became widely distributed to mainstream programmers. Here’s Don’s post for that day.

So I’d like to celebrate that five year anniversary today, and honor the huge amount of work that went into that launch.

Furthermore, I propose that we call April 12th “F# day” from now on and celebrate each it each year with huge fireworks and lots of beer. (Ok, maybe we don’t have to have fireworks, but the beer is essential).

Happy F# Day!