While these are nice... Are there no headline features? Macros or something?
Doesn't seem so. Just a good ol' fashioned incremental update.
Ahh, the benefits of a nice stable language with no breaking changes.
Introducing F# 4.0
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#12While these are nice... Are there no headline features? Macros or something?
There is a lot more details on the MSDN blogs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/04/29/rounding-o...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/11/12/announ...
For me the most welcome change is the vastly improved consistency of the Seq/List/Array APIs.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#13Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
Hunh? C# was one of my first professional languages and I used it for five years. It's an excellent language and many people use it. What 'grain' do you think you are going against?
The more platforms and languages you get exposed to, the more informed choices you'll be able to make in the future.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#14Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
F# in particular is not a 'mainstream' .Net language, its community is more similar to the Haskell community than the general .NET community.
For a young developer in 2015 really no reason not to use .NET. Other than its just not as popular, which is good enough reason.
For older folks the main stumbling block is... Microsoft has run long and brutal cons before. If your memory is long you just don't trust them.they are doing everything right... But still.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#15Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
It is somewhat lacking in the community. What's there is quite friendly, cool, and often doing neat things. There just isn't as many libraries as, say, Python, because there aren't as many people.
I'd say learn the MS ecosystem for the same reason I learned Linux way back when: a different perspective.
You'll see all the same things, but sometimes done a different way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. I'm pretty confident you'll have at least one "that's a great way to do that" moment.
Maybe you'll come away from the experience much as I have: I don't really care what the tech is. Will it do what I need it to? It also has made picking up "new" tech (ain't nuthin' new) really easy.
Oh, and search for "dotnet". Most places use that. Google will search for ".net" if you add in "C#" or something.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#16Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
I hope you don't get downvoted, those seems like reasonable questions. I'm part of the F# community I guess, so I suppose I could try and answer!
I'm not sure the F# community is the same as the broader .NET community. I think at the moment, with functional programming being a little more niche still, it's perhaps quite self-selecting. It has a lot of people in who really care. I think that's a good thing - I hope - but obviously the broader .NET community is perhaps more heterogenous - it can feel quite enterprise-y or business-y in places, unsurprisingly.
I hope the F# community wouldn't be found lacking, unfriendly, etc. We certainly try hard to be welcoming and inclusive, and I think generally do OK - although we could do better I'm sure, as could every community. There probably isn't as much open source in the .NET world as there is for Ruby/Node as much as anything else because of the backgrounds of the languages and communities (Microsoft has a strong influence over certain parts) but there is still quite a lot, with some very enthusiastic smart folk.
What's stopping people adopting it? Probably too long an answer for here. I would say that I think there are fewer and fewer things preventing adoption as time goes on, especially with F#, and there are some cool startups trying to do big things.
I'd like to think it's friendly, and I'd also like to think it's always open to ideas from other communities. If you wanted to chat as Ruby or Node dev (or anything else) I hope you'd be welcomed.
(Final note - NuGet is kind of like NPM yes - it's a common binary packaging form for dependency management. It has flaws, but is commonly used, and is certainly better than nothing. In the F# world at least, Paket is doing very well - it's compatible with NuGet packages, but perhaps slightly more accurate about using and managing them!)
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#17While these are nice... Are there no headline features? Macros or something?
There is a lot more details on the MSDN blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/04/29/rounding-o... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/11/12/announ... For me the most welcome change is the vastly improved consistency of the Seq/List/Array APIs.
"The .NET framework supports up to 32-dimensional arrays, but in the past F# only supported use of up to rank-4 arrays. Not only were arrays of rank 5+ not possible to create and manipulate from F# code, the compiler could sometimes fail to consume external libraries which relied on high-dimensional arrays.
This is now fixed. Although there is not yet support for creating and manipulating high-rank arrays, the compiler will now properly handle these types up to rank-32."
Has anyone here ever used "high-rank" arrays? The deepest I've ever gone was 4 for a lookup table, but I'm wondering what the use-case is for super high depth arrays as well as why there is a limit at all.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#18While these are nice... Are there no headline features? Macros or something?
It is kind of funny that F# 4.0 got to the top of Hacker news while F# 3.0 with the type providers (which is an amazing innovation, if you ask me) didn't get that much publicity when it came out.
I think it's just a matter of timing. Now that the F# community is getting bigger (see number of user groups at http://c4fsharp.net), more stable (see the F# Foundation http://foundation.fsharp.org), and Microsoft is becoming more open (reinforcing the already much more open F# space), it is just a good time for looking into F#. And F# 4.0 announcement is a good excuse for that :-).
Though F# 4.0 is the first version of the language designed and developed in a fully open way, which is pretty amazing change - and more important than many language features that could be added to F#.
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#19Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
If I may, I think you're harvesting downvotes (very light grey as I write this) because your phrasing could read that Microsoft the company is frightening you because they're the Big Evil, etc... this being one of the inevitable (and inevitably tiresome) derailing comments that enters any thread about Microsoft and immediately gets downvotes because Boring.
After I re-read your comment it seemed you might be saying Microsoft tech intimidates you, perhaps because of the perception of it being big enterprise, dominated by Chief Poobah Architects, etc.
Ambiguity's a funny thing. :)
Re: Introducing F# 4.0
#20Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I do…
Hunh? C# was one of my first professional languages and I used it for five years. It's an excellent language and many people use it. What 'grain' do you think you are going against? The more platforms and languages you get exposed to, the more informed choices you'll be able to make in the future.
Subjective, but I've never met a C# developer and I know approximately zero developers who run Windows.