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Why F#?

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Re: Why F#?

#131

Post by raphinou »

kqr wrote: post #124
raphinou wrote: post #107

F# was for me the best functional language when I looked at rewriting a Ruby on Rails app. I wanted to go with a functional language, as it seems to better fit my thinking and reasoning, and I looked at Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, F#. Being a stranger to Microsoft technologies, F# was the least likely to be chosen, but easily became the first choice. Haskell's purity made it hard to adopt (for me), Ocaml's ecosystem is su…

Curious since you don't expand on it on the blog: in what way did Haskell's purity make it difficult to you? Having used Haskell in production for a bit now, I don't even notice its purity. Most functions are in some kind of I/O context making it similar as other languages, except with the option of running without I/O capabilities for functions that shouldn't need it.

I honestly don't remember as it was +/-6 years ago. I had started learning Haskell and got to that conclusion. Maybe that I am now more versed in FP I would arrive at another conclusion? I don't know.

Another thing that was hard to grasp for me were the special operators like =In the end, F# was in my (personal) experience much more approachable, and it let me learn the functional concepts along the way.

Re: Why F#?

#132

Post by shortrounddev2 »

malakai521 wrote: post #123
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that changes things. You'd have to async it all the way to the top but the syntax is still cleaner than F#. If you're using an Asp.Net controller you just declare the handler as async Task and it's fine. Even program main methods can be async these days

The syntax is exactly the same. You have `var x = await` in C# and `let! x =` in F# The controller handler is also the same. It will be marked with `async` keyword in C# and `task` CE in F#

It's absolutely not exactly the same; let! is only available within a computation block. If you want to return some value from the computation block and return to Functional land without having to pause the thread you need to use a continuation, which C# has built in syntactic sugar for in async/await and F# does not.

Re: Why F#?

#133

Post by pantsforbirds »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #128

Does anyone else find interesting that people who write blog posts saying "my favourite language is X", it's never a mainstream language..?

My favorite language is Python, but I wouldn't write a blog post about it because no one would care.

Re: Why F#?

#134

Post by jxjnskkzxxhx »

pantsforbirds wrote: post #133
jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #128

Does anyone else find interesting that people who write blog posts saying "my favourite language is X", it's never a mainstream language..?

My favorite language is Python, but I wouldn't write a blog post about it because no one would care.

My favourite language is also python, and I would love to read your blog post on why your favourite language is python :-)

Re: Why F#?

#135

Post by Hojojo »

jonsagara wrote: post #103

The killer feature for me is type providers. I need to read a lot of CSV files of varying formats, and the CSV Type Provider lets me make quick work of them in a type-safe manner. https://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Data/library/CsvProvider...

Wow, that sounds awesome. I'm jealous.

Re: Why F#?

#137

Post by JohnyTex »

lihaoyi wrote: post #6

I learned F# in 2013 and had a lot of fun with it, some of that code remains on Github (e.g. a 2D platformer game for windows https://github.com/lihaoyi/FSharpMetro/tree/master/Applicati... ). My experience was that it was a surprisingly nice language with a surprisingly warty user experience: papercuts ranging from naming conventions and function call styles (`|> List.map` vs `.Select`), basic syntax (`foo.[0]` to l…

FWIW I think writing F# is a really cohesive experience in day-to-day work. While there are usually at least two ways to do things, due to .NET interoperability requirements, it’s usually pretty clear which way is the “right” way to do something.

F# feels kind of similar to Python in this regard, where there might be more than one way to do it, but there is community and ecosystem consensus on what is the right way.

I think a lot of credit should go to Don Syme for this; he seems to have a very clear vision of what F# should and should not be, and the combination of features ends up being very tasteful and well composed.

Re: Why F#?

#138

Post by gibibit »

pjc50 wrote: post #22
eknkc wrote: post #3

As far as I can tell F# is one of those things where every single user is extremely happy. This happens rarely and I really am curious about the thing but never had time to get into it. I'm also pretty well versed in the .net ecosystem so it's probably gonna be easy. Any tips? What kind of workflows might benefit the most if I were to incorporate it (to learn..)?

The funny thing is that you can write very similar code in C#, so maybe you don't need to switch which language you're using as a CLR frontend. using System.Linq; using System; var names = new string[] {"Peter", "Julia", "Xi" }; names.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ToList().ForEach(greeting => Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#")); LINQ is such a good library that I miss it in other languages. The Java s…

For reference, Rust provides a similar experience

    let names = ["Peter", "Julia", "Xi"];
    names
        .map(|name| format!("Hello, {name}"))
        .iter()
        .for_each(|greeting| println!("{greeting}! Enjoy your Rust"));

Re: Why F#?

#139

Post by malakai521 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #51

> Why F#? I'm kinda wondering if anyone here with decent C#/.net experience can give their version of the answer? --- The article really didn't answer its own question. It basically says "How" instead of "Why"... ...Which as someone who's spent over 20 years in C#, and tends to advocate for "functional" style, leaves me with more questions than answers!

A nicer, cleaner and simpler syntax, superior pattern matching, active patterns, discriminated unions and computation expressions

Re: Why F#?

#140

Post by raphinou »

mike1o1 wrote: post #125
raphinou wrote: post #107

F# was for me the best functional language when I looked at rewriting a Ruby on Rails app. I wanted to go with a functional language, as it seems to better fit my thinking and reasoning, and I looked at Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, F#. Being a stranger to Microsoft technologies, F# was the least likely to be chosen, but easily became the first choice. Haskell's purity made it hard to adopt (for me), Ocaml's ecosystem is su…

There was a large group of folks that left Ruby on Rails for Elixir (even has a similar looking syntax), yet it wasn't on your list of languages to consider. Just curious, was there a particular reason?

I should have mentioned in the message, but I was looking for a strongly typed language. I was an avid-user of dynamically-typed languages, but that particular Ruby on Rails app became unmaintainable, and part of the culprit was due to the dynamic typing. I hoped that using a statically typed language would make it easier to maintain a complex app in the long term. And I must say that it totally materialised, to the point that I don't want to develop in dynamically typed languages anymore.

Here's an example: as I said in my original message, I was a complete stranger to the dotnet ecosystem, and I learned the F# language at the same time. And I decided to develop the app as a library project to be used by the web app. I completely missed the prevalence of the async approach in the dotnet, and all my code was synchronous. One day, about half-way in the project, I realised I needed to switch to async code. Had this happened in a dynamically typed project, it would have been hell for me. Maybe it's me that can't grasp a project well enough, but I need the type-guardrails to find my way in large refactorings. And with the strong types, large refactorings can be done confidently. They don't replace tests, but make the refactoring process much more smooth.

The app is open source and its code is at: https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb It doesn't have a lot of users, not the least due to lack of marketing and polishing the user experience. But I am satisfied of what I learned developing it!

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