Who am I?
Antonio Cisternino is Professor and CIO at University of Pisa. He has been involved with .NET since 2001 before the public disclosure. He has been involved in the early days of F# with particular focus on quotations given his PhD research work about meta-programming on .NET. He contributed to the “Expert F#” book series together with Don Syme and Adam Granicz. He teaches the “UI Programming” course at University of Pisa using F# since 2008. Even with the current role still programs in F# and contributed to open source projects based on the language (the most relevant recently the evReact library).
Why elect me?
For those who have read the “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden Braid” book, the analogy between programming languages and keys in music may sound familiar: only stupid people may try to write music using a single key, there are figures better expressed in a key rather than in another. I strongly believe that programming languages have the same sort of characteristic, the way figures are expressed may be more suitable to particular problems rather than others.
Having said that I strongly believe that F# has an incredible power for expressing an significant amount of programming figures, combining language designs and choices that have a very long history dating back to ML and the seventies. After 10 years I am still deeply in love with the language and the community.
If elected onto the foundation I will bring my experience in collaborating with IT industry on the global scale, and the experience of teaching and disseminating the language accumulated in a decade. Too many people still don’t really know F#, and too often I still have to pitch the language and find new fans. I have a very tight schedule, nonetheless I will get as much time as I can to contribute growing this great community.