81–90 of 107 posts
F# is a lot like OCaml. But OCaml still struggles with multiprocessing, while F# can run on the .NET infrastructure which has this solved.
I would be very worried using any language developed and marketed by a single large corporation. It’s not only that they or the language might go away suddenly (hello Google!), it’s mostly that this corporation have a de-facto iron grip on the future development of the language and the developer culture. I simply don’t use any such languages.
"Asked 11 years, 7 months ago" Has the need to use functional programming languages become obvious yet? Has C/C++ et al. fallen by the wayside, yet?
As much as a generation of Java programmers (like myself) grew up thinking that C++ was old hat and Java was its natural successor, C++ has been quietly ahead of Java with regard to lambdas, generics, type-level trickery. Not to mention performance and backward-compatibility [1].
But reading C++ makes my eyes bleed. I much prefer FP for business logic and web-app development. Haskell is fast but it's no C++, and that's OK. I wouldn't want Haskell to take C/C++ market-share. I want it to compete against other languages that don't give me performance, safety or terseness.
[1] C++17 on the Commodore 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE
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Unless you're working on a SOTA HFT application where you're optimising your latency by the nanosecond, I can't see modern .Net/F#/C# being a problem in production. Given that Bing[1] and Azure Active Directory[2] run on .Net Core/.Net 5, which are among the most used applications on the entire internet, the idea that a medium-large project cant use them is ridiculous. This isn't even just with modern .Net aswell, Mi…
I used to work in the Azure Resource Manager team and we had big GC issues there. API servers would pause for 200 ms and queues would explode. Workers would grind to a near halt in certain conditions due to GC overload. Granted this was a couple years ago and running dotnet framework, so perhaps things have improved. I think it's likely most of the serious problems there could have been fixed by smarter in memory cac…
I would be very worried using any language developed and marketed by a single large corporation. It’s not only that they or the language might go away suddenly (hello Google!), it’s mostly that this corporation have a de-facto iron grip on the future development of the language and the developer culture. I simply don’t use any such languages.
Just that F# other than C# is a bad example in that argument. There is a pretty independent F# Foundation with even the lead Microsoft / F# personell advocating it.
But C#, F#, Go, Swift, Dart, etc.? They are initially populated by developers from a specific company, and will, from the start, have that company’s culture and goals implicitly ingrained. No outside developer will be able to climb the ladder and gain any appreciable mindshare to significantly affect this; the direction is set from the start and cannot be altered as long as the original developers (or their successors from the same company) are mostly still there. To get back to my example, Unix only really started to thrive once it was taken over by the BSD developers.
(I have written about this before on here. First six years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733705) and again about two years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370067).)
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It's not _quite_ meant specifically as a better Python, but it can play that role and there is every intention of making that something that has "product truth" to it. You can look forward to some concrete improvements along those lines this year, specifically in the notebooks tooling space and some library support!
In terms of my current use, the new scripting feature with "r# nuget:.." is game changing because now we can freely share .fsx files and they...just work. Compared to praying to the pip/virtualenv gods in the python space. Really excited to see what ya'll have planned for 2021
The case against for most people is the chicken-and-egg problem of the mainstream adoption of the language. It should be relatively obvious at this point that the outright merits of a language have little or nothing to do with its popularity, at least when compared to things like the corporate backing and will behind a language (see: Objective-C / Swift), and other factors such as positioning and luck (e.g. Javascrip…
> It should be relatively obvious at this point that the outright merits of a language have little or nothing to do with its popularity I beg to differ. People had 25 years to abandon Java but since then, the usage has only grown. I remember when Groovy and Ruby had their hyped periods sometime in the 00s, but what happened to that wave in the end? Grails and Rails became history, FAANG nowadays runs on Spring, the s…
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Just that F# other than C# is a bad example in that argument. There is a pretty independent F# Foundation with even the lead Microsoft / F# personell advocating it.
Nothing which was initially developed inside a large corporation has a reasonable chance of becoming truly independent. The only example I can think of is Unix and C, and that’s only because AT&T was (for complicated reasons) legally restricted from selling it as a product, and the project was taken over by various other actors in both business and academia. But C#, F#, Go, Swift, Dart, etc.? They are initially popul…
The list goes on.
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In terms of my current use, the new scripting feature with "r# nuget:.." is game changing because now we can freely share .fsx files and they...just work. Compared to praying to the pip/virtualenv gods in the python space. Really excited to see what ya'll have planned for 2021
Oh yeah, it’s a great feature. People like it a lot more than we thought they would, and we already had high hopes for it! Still more improvements to make there, though.
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OCaml is still pretty fast and part of RHEL. How good ia linux support for F#? And how hars is it to get mono installed?
Linux support for .NET in general, and F# in specific, is good. You don't need Mono at all as of .NET Core a couple of years ago (and the situation has only improved going into .NET 5).