Monthly MSDN F# Article?

[Stachu Korick]

Background:

https://jamesmccaffrey.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/why-i-dont-like-the-f-language was written recently.

The author of this article is a frequent MSDN writer.

I have no qualms with him, but I believe that his perception is unfortunately propelled by ignorance of the subject.

That noted, the F# presence in the MSDN world is pretty much null, and I'd love to see this change. [I'm an F# dev. I hate null!!!!]

https://twitter.com/rachelreese/status/580137169169321984 is a relevant twitter chain that raised the topic, but thought I'd raise the topic here as well so we can get this rolling if it's wanted.

- Is there interest in pursuing this?

- Are you interested in writing an article once in a while?

- How can we organize this?

I'd love to participate and write an article. Thinking of a topic now.

Stachu

[Jack Fox]

His only factual "argument" is the size of the F# user base. It's unfortunate someone of his prominence would write a negative article based on his feelings.

[Stachu Korick]

That said:

Rather than witch-hunt, we can educate. Is the MSDN magazine something we can collaborate with to clear up some ignorance that may exist?
I listed the article in question merely to point out the issue.

Stachu

[Mathias Brandewinder]

Agreed, one unexpected positive effect of this blog post is that it seems to have opened doors at MSDN magazine :)

As it stands right now, it looks like Rachel Appel has something cooking, and Ted Neward hinted that he was open to ideas.

I think having a regular F# oriented article would be great. As Tomas said somewhere, if we managed to get one blog post a day for a month for F# advent, 12 articles a year seems pretty easy.

Not sure what's the best way to coordinate on this, anyone wants to drive or help out? I suspect what it would take is

- first, figure out with MSDN what they are willing to do,

- someone to coordinate with MSDN and with writers

- people volunteering articles

- people helping review / edit early

I'd love to help, but I have very little bandwidth at the moment.

Someone already suggested an article on Canopy, which sounds like a good idea to me...

[Mathias Brandewinder]

See this:

https://twitter.com/MichaelDesmond/status/580429589517844480

Monthly is probably ambitious, but submitting regularly high quality articles would probably work.

[Warren Young]

On Mar 26, 2015, at 8:25 AM, Stachu Korick <stachu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> https://jamesmccaffrey.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/why-i-dont-like-the-f-language was written recently.

I’ve put my answer to that post here: http://goo.gl/0yfTfR

[Jack Fox]

@Young posted a fine reply to the @McCaffrey article, and it's important to note the original post and the reply are both in private blogs, not on the MSDN site, which is appropriate for language war articles. 

So let's accept this as a well-intended challenge to post a regular (monthly?) series on MSDN. @Brandewinder has the right idea, this has to be approached methodically, because this is a special venue, essentially a tech magazine. Here are my thoughts on this

1) A regular monthly column, sponsored by the F# Software Foundation. (And therefore this would be a good first (or early) item for the Board of Trustees to address after the upcoming election.) Sponsorship by the foundation is a nice decoration to catch the attention of the unwary enterprise programmers. Also the FSSF can act to organize contributors.

2) A regular column will have a length constraint, which is good because the regular readers of this magazine by and large are not interested in F# (but should be!) and can easily be lured into reading a regular column that is not too long and does not beat them over the head with too much technical detail every time. 

Note: a regular column does not preclude other longer more technical articles. It just establishes a consistent message venue which magazine readers come to recognize.

3) Follow MSDN's editorial guidelines, and if possible solicit an experienced editor.

4) Each column has to be well focused, and therefore the "why F#" message can only be delivered over a series of articles. There are just too many reasons and the "column" would be too long and unfocused.

[Dave Thomas]

I don't mind writing something that I would normally have posted on my blog is someone has a topic they would be interested in hearing about?

D.