F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions • Hacker News Board

Re: F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions

#51

Post by bern4444 » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 12:38 AM UTC

Scott is able to convey ideas and subject matter so well, his site and his videos are incredibly insightful even if you never write a line of F#.

As a separate note, I find F# to be a breath of fresh air as a language, I only wish it was more widely used professionally.

The list of companies using it is few and far between similar to when people ask where lisp or scheme is used in the real world and everyone references Jane Street and Hacker News as the only two examples.

I've had fun writing a little bit of F# on my own for some personal projects using Fable to transpile it to Javascript. It can be difficult to get good with a language when you don't use it profesionally 8 hours a day 5 days a week.

Hard to convince a manager to allow for a new language in a project (it was difficult enought to get approval for TypeScript on top of Javascript to begin with).

Re: F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions

#52

Post by saulr » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

ablekh wrote: post #50

Two questions for those with significant experience developing in F#: 1. Have you tried using JetBrain's Rider IDE for that and, if so, how deficient your experience was when compared to using Rider for C# development? If, alternatively, you have used VS Code for F# development, how much support is there - generally and when compared to Rider - in terms of both language features and external frameworks/libraries (Fab…

I have several years of full-time F# experience and I’ve also made some contributions to the F# support for Rider.

1. As part of my job I flip between C# and F# often and with each new release of Rider the IDE-support gap between them is closing. Obviously C# has many more years of attention and work on its tooling, but there are very few things I yearn for when editing F# code nowadays. I also find Rider far better to use than VS Code for F#, simply because I’m so comfortable with JetBrains’s IDEs now.

2. Any time I have to model anything remotely complex in C# I always wish I was doing it in F# instead. Features like discriminated unions, exhaustive pattern matching and immutability-by-default immediately spring to mind.

Re: F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions

#53

Post by saulr » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

bern4444 wrote: post #51

Scott is able to convey ideas and subject matter so well, his site and his videos are incredibly insightful even if you never write a line of F#. As a separate note, I find F# to be a breath of fresh air as a language, I only wish it was more widely used professionally. The list of companies using it is few and far between similar to when people ask where lisp or scheme is used in the real world and everyone referenc…

The companies using F# are definitely few and far between, but G-Research in London are hiring an F# developer at the moment.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, please reach out to me at: im (at) saul.re

Re: F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions

#54

Post by ablekh » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

saulr wrote: post #52

ablekh wrote: post #50

Two questions for those with significant experience developing in F#: 1. Have you tried using JetBrain's Rider IDE for that and, if so, how deficient your experience was when compared to using Rider for C# development? If, alternatively, you have used VS Code for F# development, how much support is there - generally and when compared to Rider - in terms of both language features and external frameworks/libraries (Fab…

I have several years of full-time F# experience and I’ve also made some contributions to the F# support for Rider. 1. As part of my job I flip between C# and F# often and with each new release of Rider the IDE-support gap between them is closing. Obviously C# has many more years of attention and work on its tooling, but there are very few things I yearn for when editing F# code nowadays. I also find Rider far better…

I appreciate you sharing your experiences. (Though your comment on #2 is very helpful as well, I was specifically interested in quantified estimates of differences in resulting system quality and developer productivity, if at all possible.) BTW, do you use any external frameworks? Would you prefer to use something like Fable over Blazor for Web development or vice versa? Why?

Re: F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions

#55

Post by monsieurbanana » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 11:38 AM UTC

mythz wrote: post #42

monsieurbanana wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None? That's not what they are arguing against. You can see and compile the F# code, but since you need for that to use an already built compiler provided by Microsoft, you need to trust it. Even compiling the compiler and then use that compiler to compile your code doesn't help, because the first compiler that was compiled by someone's else might tamper the resulting compiler binary.

> None? That's not what they are arguing against. So why are you still looking for issues when there's solutions avoiding their stated objection? > Even compiling the compiler and then use that compiler to compile your code doesn't help So what's the threat model now? that MS will risk their reputation, established business models and subject themselves to liability to poison the bootstrapped compiler to detect when…

I'm not looking for issues. You asked a question, I answered it.