Is there any MCTS/MCITP certification for F# yet?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi,
Hope I'm not duplicating another thread but I can't seem to find one. (On reflection, the search term "f#" probably isn't a good place to start though).

Basically I'm curious re functional programming. However, I don't want to go off into some sort of cul-de-sac with Haskell, OCaml or other functional languages if they're stand-alone hobby languages that don't have the potential for deployment in a workplace context.

I'm looking at F# simply because it is part of the .NET circus, but I don't want to take on this additional challenge if there isn't any prospect of it counting towards a MCTS or MCITP certification. I couldn't find anything specifically to do with F# on the Microsoft certification site, so thought I'd better ask here.

My background? Some rudimentary knowledge of OOP. (I'm currently studying a course in Java. I have also make a cursory attempt at getting the basics of C# via the Mono project but have decided to focus my object-oriented programming efforts on Java). I'd hope that functional programming could help me develop a different perspective on programming, without having to go back to procedural programming basics.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

No there is no MCTS on F# also there is no MCTS on Powershell, theres not even really C# or SQL exams, you see Microsoft don't really do programming certifications. The few MS 'programming' certifications that exist test on tools and frameworks mainly.

I don't think OCaml is a 'hobby language'. All functional languages seem to be limited in their appeal, most popular languages are multi-paradigm.

F# is pretty niche too, far better to learn C# if you want to stay mainstream.

C# now has LINQ and Lamdas, so it has some functional concepts.

If you are just starting out probably better to use native .NET than Mono for most people.

You can do aspects of functional programming in many languages, for example using function pointers in C, but its supposed to come into its own in a 'pure' functional language. I looked at F# but to be honest it seems designed for mathematicians not engineers, the syntax that looks like a neat equation in small blocks, can quickly become unreadable in larger blocks. Apparently you are then supposed to transition to C#.

 

Thanks, My route to C# via Mono came through being a Mac user, as it was the easiest means through which I could explore it. I had a PC partition up until recently, which allowed me to do a little with some of the Express Editions of the .NET tools, but have now bought a PC and so will probably take a further look at C# again.
My initial look at F# came via the potential it has for certain situations, eg it goes a little back towards meeting the mathematical foundations of programming languages but without obsessing on logs etc. (My own interest stems from statistical analysis and the potential for financial modelling but I'd imagine that, at the entry level I'm currently at, I'd probably be better off using the functional concepts within C# or Python).
Thanks, I'll probably take on the .NET platform in greater depth.

 

Well people build financial models in all sorts of languages, VBA/Excel, Matlab, Mathematica, R, Python, F#, C++, C#, Java, anything really.

To do it professionally you are looking at mostly at one or more of VBA/Excel, SAS, Matlab, C++ or C# probably. Some SQL and datamining knowledge might come in handy too.