F# is great
Even if you never write a single line, it’s a fantastic illustrative language.
For example I refer to https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ all the time for functional programming ideas.
Why F#?
251–260 of 424 posts
Re: Why F#?
#252As a person who's worked with the author (a great guy!) and with the F# community on a very large F# project: don't bother with F#, professionally speaking.
F# has many theoretical qualities, which make it fun if you like these things, but it also has some fundamental flaws, which is why it's not getting a wide professional adoption.
- the build system was a mess last I checked (slow, peculiar)
- syntax is not c-like or python-like (a big deal for a lot of people)
- you can't hire developers who know it (and certainly the few are not cheap)
- the community is a bit weird/obsessed/evangelizing (a turn off in a professional environment)
- it's clearly a second class citizen in the .net world (when stuff breaks, good luck getting support)
On the other hand
- it has discriminated unions
- units
- etc.
but do you need this stuff (not want: need)? most people don't.
Re: Why F#?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
F# is a big language, it is a ML multi paradigm language that interoperates with C# so there is a lot of necessary complexity and many ways to do the same thing. A strong benefit of this is the ability to create a working functional paradigm prototype that can iteratively be refined to a faster version of itself by hot spot optimizing the slower parts with equivalent highly mutable functions while staying within the…
It is best to just use task CE full-time unless you need specific behavior of async CEs. The author of the original comment, however, does not know this nor tried verifying whether F# actually works seamlessly with this nowadays (it does). Writing asynchronous code in F# involves less syntax noise than in C#. None of that boilerplate is required, F# should not be written that way at all.
I understand that you CAN do this, I'm saying that it makes your code look like shit and takes away some of the elegance of ML
Re: Why F#?
#254Earlier 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!
Is F# easier to learn than Scala? (I know a bit of Scala (in the old 2.x days) but have no knowledge of F#.)
It was for me.
Re: Why F#?
#255F# 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.
You gotta remember people are often picking languages based on what they can easily find out about it and extrapolating/guessing about what problems they'll run into with their expected use.
A few years ago on here I had an interesting conversation with someone who wasn't going to use rescript for something because they didn't like how it handled object types. I can't remember ever using an object type in rescript; we all just convert js objects to record type in the extern binding. But that's not information easily available to someone who has never used the language.
Same thing here I think. If you don't already have familiarity with this paradigm, it's hard to imagine what using an IO monad for side effects is like. It's not easy to tell how hard it'll be to learn it, how much it may affect the rest of your code, etc. It's easy to imagine someone (shit even me a few years ago) going "eh I'll take the language with the big easy escape hatches just in case."
Re: Why F#?
#256In the case of F#, the use cases are diminishing with every new C# release, since C# is getting better and better at the things F# is supposed to be strong at (record types, pattern-matching, etc.). Better to write the thing in C# using modern features of the more popular and capable language.
Unions remain the killer F# feature missing from C#.
Also, basic object initialization in C# has turned into a nightmare with recent versions. You need a flowchart to select among the 18 syntax options which suite your current needs.
With F# (and other newer languages), record fields are either `T` or `T option`. No need to worry about whether the value needs to be computed in a constructor and then remain immutable, whether it needs to be initialized by an object initializer and/or a constructor or not, whether it needs to remain interior-ly mutable throughout the life of the record, and so on. (Although as I recall you do still need to consider null values assigned to non-nullable references in your F# code that consumes C#.)
Re: Why F#?
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, F# is an open source project controlled by the F# Software Foundation, the .NET Foundation, and Microsoft.
> controlled by the F# Software Foundation, the .NET Foundation, and Microsoft. It is controlled by Microsoft. It's not going on my Linux or BSD boxes. I know how they work, and I want nothing to do with them.
Do you make sure to run a linux kernel with all the MS stuff patched out also?
Re: Why F#?
#258I'm completely convinced that F# (along with Scala, Haskell, and OCaml) adoption has stalled due to having ridiculously bad build systems. More significantly, they are being passed up in favor of Rust, which is a great language but nonetheless a bad fit for a lot of problem domains, simply because Rust has a superior build system. Hell, 80% of the reason I choose Rust over C++ for embedded work is because of the buil…
While I've never used it in anger, I really quite like dune. Was there something specific that makes you characterise it as "ridiculously bad"?
Re: Why F#?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is best to just use task CE full-time unless you need specific behavior of async CEs. The author of the original comment, however, does not know this nor tried verifying whether F# actually works seamlessly with this nowadays (it does). Writing asynchronous code in F# involves less syntax noise than in C#. None of that boilerplate is required, F# should not be written that way at all.
I understand that you CAN do this, I'm saying that it makes your code look like shit and takes away some of the elegance of ML
Please stop insisting on this. Task CE exists since F# 6.0 and handles awaiting the CoreLib Tasks and ValueTasks without any ceremony.
Re: Why F#?
#260F# 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.
For me, Haskell's image and ideal of purity are what made it difficult when I started out. I tried learning the language by reimplementing a program I'd previously done imperatively, that was (in hindsight) obviously hard to do in a plain pure way, ended up learning about zippers and knot-tying to do something in a less efficient and more confusing way than just using something like STArray because I had this idea from reading about Haskell that this was not only a good way to do things, but would be magically fast because GHC. (It was not.)
These days I'd just do such a task more-or-less imperatively in Haskell, and I would be well guided by the types in doing so. But I also feel like you have to make a few such mistakes if you want to get a good intuition and taste for when it's good do things purely and when imperatively.