Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
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Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#2(2015)
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#3This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.)
I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in.
If I had to pick a language that predicted you'll do poorly on a practical interview exercise, I would pick F# every time. For some reason the candidates just do not do well. Now I can think of some confounders - maybe the types of people who would apply to a job with some dynamic programming requirements and people who are good at F# just have no overlap. I've thought about that.
But it seems like this line
Pragmatists don't make technology decisions on the basis of what is better. They prefer the safety of the herd.
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#4This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.) I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in. If I had to pick a language that pre…
I found F# great for dynamic programming, do you recall what tripped them up?
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#5This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.) I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in. If I had to pick a language that pre…
Are you implying this is a F# problem? What language do candidates do well in?
Is F# too approachable due to its closeness to C#, popular with C# professionals, and therefore not approached as a functional programming language as much as a C# extension?
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#6This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.) I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in. If I had to pick a language that pre…
I disagree on almost every count: it's a badly written essay, but it makes a valid point.
> I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here.
Does this mean that you're measuring, like, how fast someone can deploy a CRUD webapp in the given language? I can imagine F# would do poorly on that kind of metric; it's optimized for maintainability and doesn't take unprincipled shortcuts, whereas something like Ruby lets you type one line and it will blat out a bunch of defaults via unmaintainable magic.
> Implies that if someone just saw some code in F# and realized what people can do in it, they would be super impressed. I have not found that to be the case. If that's a general problem and not just a quirk of my personal experience, that has to be fixed first.
I don't think it's a general problem; almost everyone who spends any significant time working in F# returns to C# reluctantly if at all. It's already a "better" language in the sense of how nice it is to program in and how productive a programmer feels when doing so. But those aren't the metrics that matter.
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#7(2015)
I really scratched my head at this one, at first. "Why your F# evangelism isn't working" — uhh, maybe because it's a decade late?
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#8just as true today as 2015 when the article was written, except C# got even better.
While I like the F# language, I don't like the (understandably) abandonware of the small community. I've ported most of my F# stuff to C#, and it's not that much different in that you can program in a functional style in C#. Probably the nicest thing in F# that C# doesn't have is computation expressions.
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#9This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.) I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in. If I had to pick a language that pre…
Are you implying this is a F# problem? What language do candidates do well in? Is F# too approachable due to its closeness to C#, popular with C# professionals, and therefore not approached as a functional programming language as much as a C# extension?
I've seen Elixir, Python, Javascript, Java, Scala, Clojure, C#, Go, and more; not sure who is at the top, but F# is 100% at the bottom (just in my personal experience.) I wouldn't chalk it up to being too approachable.
Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
#10This is a nicely written essay and, I think, completely wrong. (One person's experience here, just as a disclaimer.) I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here. You can do the exercises in the language you're most comfortable in. If I had to pick a language that pre…
I'd love to know what dynamic programming exercises you're asking interviewees to complete in the timespan of an interview that wouldn't show up on LeetCode.