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

Tour of F#

docs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 140 posts

Re: Tour of F#

#131

Post by saghm »

eptcyka wrote: post #118
saghm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Go had some way of mitigating that and the lack of generics, then the Hello World experience would be better for more people. Does the lack of generics really impact the experience of "Hello World"? I don't think I've ever seen generics used in a "Hello World" example even in languages that have them.

Whenever I evaluate a language past the hello world stage, I try to do something more complex. Which is where the generics come in. Imagine for a second that I may want a hashmap with a custom key/hash function (most often it would actually be a set) for my own datatype. I can't just use the built in hashmap _language construct_ (the hashmap is it's own, very special type), I either have to write a hashmap implementa…

I definitely agree with you that I prefer having generics to not having them and would consider that in my evaluation of a language; I just found it strange that a random reference to the lack of generics was dropped in the middle of an otherwise cohesive description of the pros and cons of the "hello world" experience.

Re: Tour of F#

#133

Post by throwaway7645 »

agentultra wrote: post #87
sp33der89 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was your experience with F# and game development? I like F#'s syntax so much more than C#(plus some stuff like pattern matching are so nice). However I feel like FP isn't effective for gamedev.

> However I feel like FP isn't effective for gamedev. Oddly, in my limited experience, it is very effective. I can't say it's the right pattern for every game but for the current roguelike I've been working on in my spare time it's been the best thing since sliced bread. I use the Reader and State Transformer monads in a pattern similar to the Elm Architecture that results in my engine being completely deterministic.…

Can you do a blog post on this?

Re: Tour of F#

#134

Post by yawaramin »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #121
yawaramin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are some excellent points. There's no organised, searchable F# package index. We rely heavily on NuGet, which is a generalised .Net mishmash. And we suffer from the same problems that almost every other non-dominant language does when targeting a runtime dominated by another language. The best I can offer you right now for F#-specific packages is http://fsharp.org/community/projects/ --and the advice that, if y…

If they're desperate, please tell someone to write a book for noobs. I opened The Book of F# and recoiled in horror. The whole book was basically if you're a C# expert, here is how F# is different...or at least a lot of it.

Sorry, you picked the wrong book to start with. Its blurb page says: 'If you're a traditional .NET developer used to C# and Visual Basic, discovering F# will be a revelation that will change how you code.... Break free of that old school of programming.'

Try Pickering & Eason's Beginning F# 4.0; its intro has a 'Who Is This Book For?' section, which says: 'This book is aimed primarily at IT professionals.... A working knowledge of the .NET framework ... would be nice, but it's not necessary.'

Re: Tour of F#

#135

Post by xvilka »

I wonder, what are the pluses of F# that missing in more mature and widely adopted OCaml? Why to create a clone of good language? With porting opam to Windows platform [1], along with improving the Unicode support [2] in it I'd say it has a bigger potential in this field.

[1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191

[2] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/153

Re: Tour of F#

#136

Post by spiffytech »

xvilka wrote: post #135

I wonder, what are the pluses of F# that missing in more mature and widely adopted OCaml? Why to create a clone of good language? With porting opam to Windows platform [1], along with improving the Unicode support [2] in it I'd say it has a bigger potential in this field. [1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191 [2] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/153

Pluses include mulithreaded concurrency and access to .NET libraries (including interop to/from your employer's proprietary C# code).

Re: Tour of F#

#137

Post by aryehof »

camus2 wrote: post #82
agentultra wrote: post #12

So much like OCaml... but I like the ability to annotate units! That's very cool.

Unfortunatly Ocaml has many drawbacks: the developer experience isn't great, it's complicated to install and to get started with and the ecosystem related to web development is quite poor. That's not the case for F# and I really really hope it picks up steam. ML languages are really great when it comes to data modelling, domain driven design, writing algorithms and stuff like that. they are a nice compromise between…

How is it good for domain driven design? Can you point to where I can learn more of this?

Re: Tour of F#

#138

Post by throwaway7645 »

yawaramin wrote: post #134
throwaway7645 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're desperate, please tell someone to write a book for noobs. I opened The Book of F# and recoiled in horror. The whole book was basically if you're a C# expert, here is how F# is different...or at least a lot of it.

Sorry, you picked the wrong book to start with. Its blurb page says: 'If you're a traditional .NET developer used to C# and Visual Basic, discovering F# will be a revelation that will change how you code.... Break free of that old school of programming.' Try Pickering & Eason's Beginning F# 4.0; its intro has a 'Who Is This Book For?' section, which says: 'This book is aimed primarily at IT professionals.... A workin…

Lol I learned that very fast while reading through :)

Isn't 4.0 pretty far out of date now?

Re: Tour of F#

#139

Post by yawaramin »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #138
yawaramin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you picked the wrong book to start with. Its blurb page says: 'If you're a traditional .NET developer used to C# and Visual Basic, discovering F# will be a revelation that will change how you code.... Break free of that old school of programming.' Try Pickering & Eason's Beginning F# 4.0; its intro has a 'Who Is This Book For?' section, which says: 'This book is aimed primarily at IT professionals.... A workin…

Lol I learned that very fast while reading through :) Isn't 4.0 pretty far out of date now?

Just putting it out there for the next person who sees this :-)

F# 4.0 is not really out of date. The language is fairly fixed now--apart from fixing buggy behaviour actually.

Part of it is that the general ML syntax is pretty timeless--all ML books share this advantage. As for F# specifically, all the headline functionality--type providers, quotations etc.--has been there for a while. I expect books covering 4.0 to be remarkably future-proof.

Re: Tour of F#

#140

Post by throwaway7645 »

yawaramin wrote: post #139
throwaway7645 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol I learned that very fast while reading through :) Isn't 4.0 pretty far out of date now?

Just putting it out there for the next person who sees this :-) F# 4.0 is not really out of date. The language is fairly fixed now--apart from fixing buggy behaviour actually. Part of it is that the general ML syntax is pretty timeless--all ML books share this advantage. As for F# specifically, all the headline functionality--type providers, quotations etc.--has been there for a while. I expect books covering 4.0 to…

Thanks!
Post reply on HN