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

Why F#?

batsov.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 424 posts

Re: Why F#?

#241

Post by akkad33 »

MrMcCall wrote: post #5
nickpeterson wrote: post #2

Because it’s great, and people that think otherwise are dead to me.

Curried functions combined with that magnificent pipe operator, overlaid on the .NET runtime. Don Syme et al knocked it out of the park. It's the one programming language that changed how I think about programming. I'm only talking about the version before type providers. Then it got messy. Before that, we could (and I did) recompile fsi.exe to do some custom prompt manipulation. It was a slog, but it worked, but the…

It has great ideas but because of all these conveniences it is very bad for performance based programming making it slower than C#. I like the ideas in Roc language to make functional programming as fast as imperative by controlling allocations in things like closures

Re: Why F#?

#242

Post by Lanayx »

gwbas1c wrote: post #218
int_19h wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really need to split 1 & 2, since F# can define .NET interfaces and abstract classes just fine. For that matter, you don't even need the interfaces if you wouldn't have had them in a C#-only solution. Just define the class in F# and use it directly from C#. You still need a separate assembly for F#, but that doesn't imply dependency injection - again, just reference it and use it.

I've identified a possible use case for F# in a preexisting product; I'm looking for the simplest way to integrate F#.

F# excels in writing domain logic where main domain entities are defined as records and discriminated unions and logic is written in pure functions. Given that product is preexisting and domain entities must already be defined, I wonder what use case do you have in mind?

Re: Why F#?

#243

Post by mrkeen »

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..?

Successful language designers select for what's popular, not what's good.

C++ intersected the mass of C programmers with the new OO fad, and kept all of C's warts. Had Stroustrup made C++ better, he wouldn't have an army of adopters who already knew C. Maybe merit will win out in the long run [1]? I'm not hopeful.

Java needed to be close enough to C++, and C# to Java. And Brendan Eich joined Netscape to "put Scheme in the browser".

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_a...

Re: Why F#?

#244

Post by michaelcampbell »

raphinou wrote: post #144
breadwinner wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache Spark, Delta Lake are written Scala. Being JVM based, it has a large ecosystem. Scala seems like a better choice than F#.

I'm sure it can be the better choice, but for me it was not. It seems there was some incompatibility between me and Scala. I find it such a complex language and I never managed to wrap my head around it. As I said F# was my last choice at the start of my evaluation, and Scala was high on the list due to the Java ecosystem. But in the end it didn't work out for me. F# on the JVM would be great though!

Is Frege still being developed?

Re: Why F#?

#245

Post by michaelcampbell »

hurril wrote: post #213
raphinou wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it can be the better choice, but for me it was not. It seems there was some incompatibility between me and Scala. I find it such a complex language and I never managed to wrap my head around it. As I said F# was my last choice at the start of my evaluation, and Scala was high on the list due to the Java ecosystem. But in the end it didn't work out for me. F# on the JVM would be great though!

It runs on .NET, for god's sake. This is not a small platform.

Basically everything runs on an OS, which is even more complex.

Re: Why F#?

#246

Post by michaelcampbell »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #148
breadwinner wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache Spark, Delta Lake are written Scala. Being JVM based, it has a large ecosystem. Scala seems like a better choice than F#.

I think Clojure is the better option if you want to do FP using the JVM ecosystem. The problem (for me, anyway) I've run into with Scala is that it supports both functional programming and object-oriented programming. Every code base I've worked on in Scala has ended up being a hodgepodge of both, which I find annoying. However, the best functional programming language is, of course, Elixir. :D

Isn't Clojure similarly (or even moreso) multiparadigm?

Re: Why F#?

#247

Post by gonesurfing »

bob1029 wrote: post #185
UK-Al05 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language is just as much about what it can't do, then what it can do.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I assume you are implying that too many choices could confuse a junior developer, which I agree with. However, I don't think this is a concern in the bigger picture when talking about the space of all languages.

My 2p's worth is that the whole of F# is more than the some of its parts. When you say in your previous comment "All the good stuff has been pirated from F#" it misses the point of what it's actually like to use F#. The problem is, it's almost impossible to communicate what it's like. You have to try it and you have to keep going until you get over the initial "WTF!?" hump. There will be a WTF hump.

For example, C# may have cribbed the language features, but F# is expression based and immutable by default. Try using the same features in this context and the whole game changes.

Re: Why F#?

#248

Post by psychoslave »

int_19h wrote: post #176
psychoslave wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as fluency goes, that’s not very impressive. %w{Peter Julia Xi}.map{"Hello, #{it}"}.each{puts "#{it}! Enjoy your Ruby"} That’s of course trivial examples. And while Ruby now have RBS and Sorbet, it’s yet another tradeoff compared to a syntax that has upfront static analysis as first class citizen in mind. That is, each language will have its strong and weak points, but so far on "fluency" I’m not aware of anyt…

Ruby is dynamically typed, which makes "fluent" API design that much easier at the cost of maintainability elsewhere. If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to compare F# to other statically typed languages.

That's exactly what I meant with the two last paragraphs.

Re: Why F#?

#249

Post by 110bpm »

I put together a quick-start guide to F# Computation Expressions — showing how you can go from C# async/await all the way to Result workflows with let!... and!... expressions, and even a custom validation {} CE. [0]

This is a practical side of F# that doesn’t get enough spotlight — but one I’m using daily.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42636791

Re: Why F#?

#250

Post by orthoxerox »

psychoslave wrote: post #159
piokoch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As far as I can tell F# is one of those things where every single user is extremely happy" Isn't it because language has rather small community of passionate people, who are devoted to their language of choice? F# popularity is somewhere between CHILL, Clipper and Raku langs, that are probably as obscure as F# for typical software dev.

I know Raku from Perl fame, and F# because it’s Microsoft, but CHILL and Clipper are totally new to me, so in my own humble experience these two latter look far more obscure. :D

Clipper is old. It's dBase/xBase/FoxPro, pre-SQL DBMSs.
Post reply on HN