Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

F# is gaining independence from .NET

onurgumus.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 181 posts

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#11

Post by andi999 »

hvidgaard wrote: post #4
29athrowaway wrote: post #2

F# is a great language, but the .NET community never embraced it.

It's a real shame, but not unexpected. The vast majority of programmers I meet in the wild simply do not have training in FP and by the time they decide to learn it (if they do), it's hard to unlearn "traditional" thinking. If we want to steer programming in that direction, we should teach functional programming before "traditional" programming. However, even if we manage to do that I'm not convinced that it will mak…

I think one problem is (was?) winforms is not available in f#. (which is c# unique selling point i. m. h. o.)

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#12

Post by dleslie »

hvidgaard wrote: post #4
29athrowaway wrote: post #2

F# is a great language, but the .NET community never embraced it.

It's a real shame, but not unexpected. The vast majority of programmers I meet in the wild simply do not have training in FP and by the time they decide to learn it (if they do), it's hard to unlearn "traditional" thinking. If we want to steer programming in that direction, we should teach functional programming before "traditional" programming. However, even if we manage to do that I'm not convinced that it will mak…

I'm a long-time Emacs user, Scheme fan, functional programming advocate ... Who uses C# in his day job.

For quite a long time F# simply wasn't ready, and by the time it was C# had already become an industry behemoth.

But more critically, it's not a language that's officially supported by Unity. That's enough for it not to be a wise choice to be betting a project on it where there are dozens of jobs on the line, and families that could be impacted.

I can't help but think that this concern isn't simply isolated to Unity software development; where else has the decision been made to not use F# on account of it not enjoying as much industry support as C#?

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#13

Post by dleslie »

freeone3000 wrote: post #8
catmanjan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a .NET developer I don't see any reason to use F# professionally. C#/CPP are tools just like a hammer, F# is a different hammer, it doesn't seem to offer advantages in my field other than being different...

It allows you to envision your application as a series of data transforms, instead of a list of steps. This allows much more proximal abstractions for tasks involving data manipulation.

You can treat your application as a series of data transforms with C#, as well.

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#14

Post by dleslie »

xupybd wrote: post #7
catmanjan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a .NET developer I don't see any reason to use F# professionally. C#/CPP are tools just like a hammer, F# is a different hammer, it doesn't seem to offer advantages in my field other than being different...

The functional hammer can be a little easier to reason about. So you can understand your application a little more.

It's possible to write functional C# code, as well.

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#16

Post by oblio »

freeone3000 wrote: post #8
catmanjan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a .NET developer I don't see any reason to use F# professionally. C#/CPP are tools just like a hammer, F# is a different hammer, it doesn't seem to offer advantages in my field other than being different...

It allows you to envision your application as a series of data transforms, instead of a list of steps. This allows much more proximal abstractions for tasks involving data manipulation.

> proximal abstractions

Proximal? Maybe you mean appropriate? Or incremental?

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#17

Post by pharmakom »

dleslie wrote: post #14
xupybd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The functional hammer can be a little easier to reason about. So you can understand your application a little more.

It's possible to write functional C# code, as well.

It’s possible but it’s just not the same.

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#18

Post by freeone3000 »

dleslie wrote: post #13
freeone3000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It allows you to envision your application as a series of data transforms, instead of a list of steps. This allows much more proximal abstractions for tasks involving data manipulation.

You can treat your application as a series of data transforms with C#, as well.

It's.. not as nice. LINQ gets halfway, but, you end up getting back to procedural modeling soon. With sufficient discipline and structure, and liberal use of LINQ and lambdas, you can mostly get there, but it lacks the purity of pure functional.

Re: F# is gaining independence from .NET

#20

Post by xupybd »

orra wrote: post #9
xupybd wrote: post #6

I'm learning F# now. The language is nice but pulling dependencies into the interactive shell is proving difficult. After a few attempts I found I could use #r to pull in dependencies. Then I found where the NuGet packages were hiding in my home dir. Finally I could reference the Fsharp.Data.dll! Then XML type provider not found.... Frustrating when I just want to play around.

Cough : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tools/fsharp-... Should be a bit easier!

Thank you!

Gah lots to learn.

Post reply on HN