Social marketing firm Buddy Media is being bought out by Salesforce.com in a $689 million stock and cash deal. The transaction will close Oct. 31 (the end of the third fiscal quarter).

Among its 1,000 customer, Buddy Media includes the companies ofFord, Hewlett-Packard and Mattel. Thanks to its capabilities of sending targeted marketing content through YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, Salesforce.com will build on the monitoring technology in social media through its recent Radian6 purchase.

According to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, the Marketing Cloud leadership will enable the company to take advantage of the massive opportunity within the next five years.

The purchase is arriving on the heels of rival Oracle’s buyout of Virtue, who is the competitor to Buddy Media.

It is said that spoken languages shape thoughts by their inclusion and exclusion of concepts, and by structuring them in different ways. Similarly, programming languages shape solutions by making some tasks easier and others less aesthetic. Using F# instead of C# reshapes software projects in ways that prefer certain development styles and outcomes, changing what is possible and how it is achieved.

F# is a functional language from Microsoft's research division. While once relegated to the land of impractical academia, the principles espoused by functional programming are beginning to garner mainstream appeal.

As its name implies, functions are first-class citizens in functional programming. Blocks of code can be stored in variables, passed to other functions, and infinitely composed into higher-order functions, encouraging cleaner abstractions and easier testing. While it has long been possible to store and pass code, F#'s clean syntax for higher-order functions encourages them as a solution to any problem seeking an abstraction.

F# also encourages immutability. Instead of maintaining state in variables, functional programming with F# models programs as a series of functions converting inputs to outputs. While this introduces complications for those used to imperative styles, the benefits of immutability mesh well with many current developments best practices.

For instance, if functions are pure, handling only immutable data and exhibiting no side effects, then testing is vastly simplified. It is very easy to test that a specific block of code always returns the same value given the same inputs, and by modeling code as a series of immutable functions, it becomes possible to gain a deep and highly precise set of guarantees that software will behave exactly as written.

Further, if execution flow is exclusively a matter of routing function inputs to outputs, then concurrency is vastly simplified. By shifting away from mutable state to immutable functions, the need for locks and semaphores is vastly reduced if not entirely eliminated, and multi-processor development is almost effortless in many cases.

Type inference is another powerful feature of many functional languages. It is often unnecessary to specify argument and return types, since any modern compiler can infer them automatically. F# brings this feature to most areas of the language, making F# feel less like a statically-typed language and more like Ruby or Python. F# also eliminates noise like braces, explicit returns, and other bits of ceremony that make languages feel cumbersome.

Functional programming with F# makes it possible to write concise, easily testable code that is simpler to parallelize and reason about. However, strict functional styles often require imperative developers to learn new ways of thinking that are not as intuitive. Fortunately, F# makes it possible to incrementally change habits over time. Thanks to its hybrid object-oriented and functional nature, and its clean interoperability with the .net platform, F# developers can gradually shift to a more functional mindset while still using the algorithms and libraries with which they are most familiar.

Related F# Resources:

F# Programming Essentials Training

1. The IRS is enabling taxpayers to download their tax transcripts over the internet from the Internal Revenue Service. The official secure URL for the transcripts download followed immediately after The White House fact sheet confirmed the decision. According to the Tech Crunch You Can Now Download Your Tax Returns From The IRS  article, there are some minor bug issues when registering. Given that security has long been problematic with the IRS, the best course of action for the public is to take some precautions when downloading personal information on mobile devices, pc’s and laptops. Installing disk encryption software on all your devices will protect your files reduce risk
2. Have an awesome Start-Up with products in ‘stealth or private beta” that you want like to pitch for a chance to get a table at Disrupt NY? TechCrunch is heading to Atlanta and New Orleans February 18^th and 20^th 2014 and will host a beer fest night in exchange for your thoughts and pitches. Tickets are $5, and all entrepreneurs, investors, dreamers or tech enthusiast are welcome.
3. Cloutex, a cloud computing future enabler has just secured their first round of seed funding.  Cloutex is an Estonian tech startup, which connects and syncs various web applications such as e-marketing, CRM and accounting tools under one convenient hub. The United Partners, SmartCap and EstBan business angels seeded the start-up with $6000, 000.
4. Could you get everything important that you need to know about living successfully from a computer program? Ryan Dube seems to think so. In his 6 Life Habits That Programming Could Teach You Today  he speaks in flow charts, loops and program modules, in the same breath as paying off debt or buying a house.  How can your programming skills help in life skills by modeling some of the same principles?
5. 10 Incredibly Simple Things You Can Do To Protect Your PrivacyPassword protect your devices.  Put alerts on your name in Google; simple tasks that can be significant in protecting your privacy.
6. Adobe Brings 3D Printing Support to PhotoshopAmong the latest updates in Adobe, Photoshop users have the ability to design 3D models from scratch as well as being able to toy around with color, shape and angles.

People are optimistic about problem solving, but in most cases this is easier said than done. How do you do it?

In Adobe’s 2016 global study on creativity in business, 96% of people identified creativity as essential to their success, both in terms of their income and the value they bring to the world. Moreover, 78% wished they were capable of thinking differently, believing that they would progress through their careers more quickly if they did.

According to Malcom Gladwell, the world's most successful people have one thing in common: they think differently from most everyone else.  In his book, How Successful People Think, Malcom opens with the following:        “Good thinkers are always in demand.  A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss. Good thinkers solve problems, they never lack ideas that can build an organization, and they always have hope for a better future”
Too often we attribute creative and “different” thinking to natural, innate characteristics that belong only to the lucky. The truth is that you can study how ridiculously successful people think and incorporate their approach into your world.

Snippets and Quotes from Tech Innovators.