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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

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Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#301

Post by tstrimple »

pc86 wrote: post #269
tstrimple wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it's time to scale out your team and now you're trying to hire dozens of F# developers it starts to matter a lot more. You can throw a rock and hit a Java developer. I hate the language, but finding other people who can be productive in it is trivial compared to F#.

One of the common threads among companies I've worked at which I would consider "successful" is that they don't really classify developers based on what languages they've used before. If you're a good programmer you can become a net positive in almost any language in a few weeks to a few months, and productive within the first year. Some of the worst companies I've worked for were the type who would toss a resume in…

I think it depends on what you mean by "successful". Surely multi-billion dollar financial organizations are by at least some definition successful. They are a complete shit show from a tech standpoint. They are so large they cannot effectively manage specialist developer staff outside of very narrow niches. Standardization when you've got thousands of developers across hundreds of products matters. Maybe some "successful" startup can make things work when they are small. But you'll find they start to standardize when they hit real scale.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#302

Post by jstimpfle »

magicalhippo wrote: post #186
devmunchies wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part of OOP is that all the properties of an object can be a mishmash of values and are mutable. In any method, you never know if the object is in some undesirable state without checking properties within the method itself. Multiply that headache across all methods and all other classes and it becomes a mutable mess. It makes it weird that we pass around objects as types when they encapsulate so much state…

> The worst part of OOP is that all the properties of an object can be a mishmash of values and are mutable. Const-ness is one of the things I really miss from C++. I could look at an object and be reasonably sure I wasn't mutating it by calling foo.length() for example.

IMHO that is of such little help and the drawbacks weigh much heavier: const-correctness spreads like a cancer (try making one thing const without having to fix a hundred other things), and often requires annoying boilerplate -- I'm no C++ expert but if these are still the best available solutions...: https://stackoverflow.com/a/123995/1073695

Sometimes I want to add one little extra thing that gets mutated in an otherwise "const" method, e.g. for debugging purposes. If the compiler doesn't let me do that because I valued the ideal of const-correctness higher than practical concerns, I know I've done something wrong.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#303

Post by throw868788 »

ericsink wrote: post #68

(Author here) Well this is a blast from the past. Back when I wrote this, I kinda hoped F# would surprise me and gain more traction than I expected. But 8 years later, if anything, it seems like the dominance of C# in the .NET ecosystem has grown. F# is still a great language, but the main fact hasn't changed: C# isn't bad enough for F# to thrive.

Would be interesting to see actual stats in F# usage which I doubt are relatively available. Given the reaction to this post from what is an old article there's still probably an underground interest in the language and some use in general. People seem to have built strong views on it either way. Especially with some posters admitting they use it professionally with a closed source culture (finance, insurance, etc). Most metrics would not be accurate given interoperability with C# - e.g Google searching I would typically look up C# code and port it for example.

Maybe it doesn't need to thrive for everyone; maybe it just needs to continue being useful for the people who employ it and add value. That's probably OK. They could be just busy building stuff instead of blogging, especially if the community is mostly compromised of senior developers (10 years +).

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#304

Post by throwaway2037 »

bazoom42 wrote: post #245
chowells wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize every single thing that dynamically-typed languages can do with data types, statically-typed languages can do too? Except when it matters, they can also choose to do things dynamically-typed languages can't. Lots of people assume static typing means creating domain types for the semantics of every single thing, and then complain that those types contain far more information than they need. Well, stop doin…

You can’t do monkeypatching or dynamically modify the inheritance chain of an object in a statically typed language. But yes, you can have a JsonNode type, which is still better than having every type being “object”.

About monkeypatching, perhaps we have difference definitions. From time to time, I need to modify a Java class from a dependency that I do not own/control. I copy the decompiled class into my project with the same package name. I make changes, then run. To me, this is monkeypatching for Java. Do you agree? If not, how is it different? I would like to learn. Honestly, I discovered that Java technique years ago by accident.

Another technique: While the JVM is running with a debugger attached, it is possible to inject a new version of a class. IDEs usually make this seamless. It also works when remote debugging. Do you consider this monkeypatching also?

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#305

Post by vladvasiliu »

sph wrote: post #259
vladvasiliu wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the EEE quip, I didn't catch any "M$ bad" vide in GP's post. I think the situation is clear-cut: until recently, you couldn't really run .net on anything else than Windows, so the only people using it were those already invested in the ecosystem. Among the people invested in the windows ecosystem, many (most ?) are large "non-tech" companies who hire people who mostly see their jobs as a meal ticket. These…

That's for coming in my defense. You are right. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I also don't hate them. It's pretty simple, really. I am a Linux engineer, and it is not a great investment of time and money for me to get into .NET. I knew F# was cool, but is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on? It makes no business sense at all.

> is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on?

I'm not a software engineer myself, nor a Windows person, so I don't know the specifics, but FWIW, my client runs production .Net code of the C# variety on Linux, connected to pgsql. It's some kind of web service for checking people's tickets (think airport gates where you scan your ticket to enter), so not exactly a toy, even though it's nowhere near unicorn-scale. It seems to work fine, in the sense that I've never heard anyone complain about anything related to this setup. No "works for me but is borken in prod" or "thingy is wonky on Linux but OK on Windows so have to build expensive workaround".

The devs run VisualStudio (non Code) on their Windows laptops. Code is then built and packaged by Azure Pipelines in a container and sent to AWS to be run on ECS.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#306

Post by IshKebab »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #48
JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been programming for 20 years, and yet despite having used dynamic languages I don’t actually know what it means to leverage dynamic programming techniques. For instance, I’ve never encountered a JavaScript codebase that I have thought couldn’t benefit from just being statically typed with Typescript. I get the impression that dynamic programming, besides the odd untyped line of code, is best used only for ext…

To be clear I wasn't referring 'dynamic programming' but as you say, the use of a dynamic language, or programming without types, mimicking what I assumed the original poster I replied to meant. My guess is that interviewees wishing to return to the typed world they are comfortable with would first try to type the JSON they are working with. Given that the JSON is messy this could be an unbounded amount of work that…

Ok that is very confusing because "dynamic programming" is a very specific thing, and also super popular in leetcode questions. Maybe half the questions on leetcode.com involve dynamic programming.

It has absolutely nothing to do with dynamically typed programming. It's also a really terrible name for what is essentially caching.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#307

Post by magicalhippo »

jstimpfle wrote: post #302
magicalhippo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst part of OOP is that all the properties of an object can be a mishmash of values and are mutable. Const-ness is one of the things I really miss from C++. I could look at an object and be reasonably sure I wasn't mutating it by calling foo.length() for example.

IMHO that is of such little help and the drawbacks weigh much heavier: const-correctness spreads like a cancer (try making one thing const without having to fix a hundred other things), and often requires annoying boilerplate -- I'm no C++ expert but if these are still the best available solutions...: https://stackoverflow.com/a/123995/1073695 Sometimes I want to add one little extra thing that gets mutated in an oth…

Perhaps it depends on the code-base. I worked on a medium complexity C++ project (~300kLOC) but which used multi-threading quite heavily with shared data structures, and there was only a couple of instances where I felt it got in the way.

In the vast majority of cases it reduced my cognitive load significantly because I could just look at the method declaration and see that my code would be fine.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#308

Post by IshKebab »

physPop wrote: post #238
lostmsu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust might take its place if the tooling would be on par. Personally I'd jump.

Rust and C# do very different things

There's a huge amount of overlap. They are both general purpose languages - as such they are in competition. I would say there are more applications where either would be a reasonable choice than there are where one is the obvious choice and the other isn't a reasonable option.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#309

Post by Hasnep »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #155
Hasnep wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a data engineer, it's a fairly new role so it's not well defined yet, but most data engineers write data pipelines to ingest data into a data warehouse and then transform it for the business to use. I'm not sure why using a static language would make translating data types difficult, but I add as many typehints as possible to my Python so I rarely do anything with dynamic types. I guess they're saying for small t…

Thank you to reply. Your definition of data engineer makes sense. From my experience, I would not call it a new role. People were doing similar things 25 years ago when building the first generation of "data warehouses". (Remember that term from the late 1990s!?) I am surprised that you are using Python for data transformation. Isn't it too slow for huge data sets? (If you are using C/C++ libraries like Pandas/NumPy,…

Yes, it's definitely a new word for an old concept, same as the term data scientist for data analyst or statistician.

I find Python is fast enough for small to medium datasets. I've normally worked with data that needs to be loaded each morning or sometimes hourly, so whether the transformation takes 1 minute or 10 minutes it doesn't matter. The better way is of course to dump the data into a data warehouse as soon as possible and then use SQL for everything, so I only use Python for things that SQL isn't suited for, like making HTTP requests.

Re: Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)

#310

Post by sph »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #305
sph wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for coming in my defense. You are right. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I also don't hate them. It's pretty simple, really. I am a Linux engineer, and it is not a great investment of time and money for me to get into .NET. I knew F# was cool, but is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on? It makes no business sense at all.

> is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on? I'm not a software engineer myself, nor a Windows person, so I don't know the specifics, but FWIW, my client runs production .Net code of the C# variety on Linux, connected to pgsql. It's some kind of web service for checking people's tickets (think airport gates where you scan your ticket to en…

I do get it. .NET now works pretty well on Linux.

But it never was a tier 1 platform during its growth. So most non-Windows devs put their focus on other platforms. There is nothing wrong with that.

I could learn .NET now, but I don't really have an interest to do so at this point; Also, the devs you talk about are on Windows, using their tier 1 IDE (Visual Studio) that only runs on Windows, which is my point exactly.

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