Foundations of F#

Preface: The Story of the Book

In 2003 I was looking for a way to process IL, the intermediate language into which all .NET languages are compiled. At the time, .NET was fairly new, and there weren't a lot of options for doing this. I quickly realized that the best option at the time, and probably still today, was an API called Abstract IL (AbsIL). AbsIL was written in a language called F#, and I decided to use this language to write a small wrapper around AbsIL so I could extract the information I needed from a DLL in a form more usable from C#. But a funny thing happened while writing the wrapper: even though in those days writing F# was a little hard going because the compiler was far from polished, I found that I actually enjoyed programming ...