Acknowledgments

The “butterfly effect,” a term coined by Edward Lorenz, is based in chaos theory: the idea is that a seemingly minor event such as a flap of butterfly’s wings somewhere in Asia can cause a major event such as a hurricane in South America. (The butterfly flapping its wings has been constant in the concept, but the location [Asia or Brazil] and the result [hurricane or tornado] have varied.) This alone would be enough to say that there were many more people (and butterflies), without whom this book would not exist than I can possibly list here. And even if I didn’t believe in chaos theory, the number of people I’d want to mention in this section would be enormous.

I would never have become interested in F# and functional programming if I hadn’t met Don Syme. Don was my mentor during two internships at Microsoft Research and it was a great pleasure to work with him and participate in long discussions about F# (and life, the universe, and everything else). I’m also grateful to James Margetson from Microsoft Research who taught me many cool functional programming tricks. However, I’d never have met Don and James if I hadn’t gained status as an MVP by Microsoft and met Luke Hoban who introduced me to Don later. If I were to continue like this, I’d end up mentioning Michal Bláha, Jan Stoklasa, Božena Mannová, the authors of CodeProject.com, and many others.