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Introducing F# 4.0

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Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#31

Post by VoiceOfWisdom »

chadzawistowski wrote: post #10
m0th87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole article is about features added. The first point is even about improvements to macros.

Unfortunately F# doesn't really have macro support... "working with expression trees is becoming easier than ever" but you can't actually unquote/eval an arbitrary expression tree. The only purpose I can see for expression trees is implementing a DSL with F# syntax.

Its not possible out of the box, but there are several community libraries to eval quotations[0].

Shame on whoever downvoted you. Add knowledge to the discussion instead of downvoting someone you disagree with. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/849416/evaluate-quoted-ex...

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#32

Post by tdestan »

bad_user wrote: post #28
msutherl wrote: post #7

Microsoft 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…

From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig…

>... and I'm even including Visual Studio itself in this mix, since an IDE that needs extra investments into ReSharper is not that good in my opinion.

That's a fair point, but even so, I've yet to find an IDE/editor/whatever that compares favorably to the combination of Visual Studio + Resharper + NCrunch.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#33

Post by reactor »

bad_user wrote: post #28
msutherl wrote: post #7

Microsoft 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…

From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig…

I couldn't agree more. My experience exactly.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#34

Post by ripberge »

msutherl wrote: post #20
jsprogrammer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The .NET community is extremely large, perhaps you run in a small circle.

A job search on indeed.com (a job listing consolidator) within 25 miles of my area, Santa Monica, CA reveals

2,477 jobs for .NET

2,083 jobs for Java

1,284 jobs for python

685 jobs for Ruby

Here are # of questions with following tags on StackOverflow:

Java: 845,330

C#: 786,850

Python: 417,737

Ruby: 132,074

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I would guess if you looked at 200 of the largest companies in Los Angeles, 90% of them have at least some .NET code running for something. It's pretty ubiquitous.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#35

Post by MichaelGG »

nightski wrote: post #30
MichaelGG wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must be taking about different things, as F# hasn't had macros and thus cannot get improvements to them. Quoted code is nice, but it's not a real substitution real macros.

Pre-processor macros...

It doesn't have those either, does it? Just basic conditional flags like C#. Or can you #define FOO bar?

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#36

Post by moonchrome »

bad_user wrote: post #28
msutherl wrote: post #7

Microsoft 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…

From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig…

>being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects

This is blatantly false. Just on my current project I'm using :

* OpenTK - opensource API around OpenGL

* ReactiveUI - opensource MVVM framework using RX for databinding

* Command Line Parser Library - opensource, does what it says

* NLog - logging library

* sqlite-net - micro ORM for sqlite

I excluded :

* RX - opensource but comes from Microsoft so not a community, but also a nice counterexample of porting from .NET to JVM as RX was innovated on .NET and later ported to other platforms

* system.data.sqlite.org - opensource .NET sqlite implementation, arguably a port from a bigger project

And that's just the references I have in my current project, there are a bunch of open source .NET projects that do cool things, for eg. MonoGame, bunch of MVVM frameworks, etc.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#37

Post by marpstar »

I've been writing most of my utility code in F# for the past few months, is there anything that you guys DON'T like about it? I'm really enjoying how terse it is in comparison to C# and haven't really run into anything that's bothered me, besides Xamarin Studio being bloated.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#38

Post by noir_lord »

ripberge wrote: post #34
msutherl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subjective, but I've never met a C# developer and I know approximately zero developers who run Windows.

The .NET community is extremely large, perhaps you run in a small circle. A job search on indeed.com (a job listing consolidator) within 25 miles of my area, Santa Monica, CA reveals 2,477 jobs for .NET 2,083 jobs for Java 1,284 jobs for python 685 jobs for Ruby Here are # of questions with following tags on StackOverflow: Java: 845,330 C#: 786,850 Python: 417,737 Ruby: 132,074 I can't speak for the rest of the world…

Damn would I like to live somewhere that has 1284 Python jobs listed, over here in the UK .Net (outside the web) dominates, love me some C# but Python just isn't on the radar at all (yet it's widely used internally).

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#39

Post by reactor »

moonchrome wrote: post #36
bad_user wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig…

>being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects This is blatantly false. Just on my current project I'm using : * OpenTK - opensource API around OpenGL * ReactiveUI - opensource MVVM framework using RX for databinding * Command Line Parser Library - opensource, does what it says * NLog - logging library * sqlite-net - micro ORM for sqlite I excluded : * RX - opensource but co…

You are just proving what OP says "the .NET community is filled with closed-minded folks that will never admit that their tooling sucks". Unfortunately, you are not seeing the whole picture.

Re: Introducing F# 4.0

#40

Post by kirse »

tpetricek wrote: post #18
MichaelGG wrote: post #6

While 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 becom…

F# 4.0 makes me excited to be using the language even more. I just started learning back in December after not really enjoying my Python learning experience and have found F# to be such a joy. Your book is one of three at my desk. I've done about 8 years on the .NET stack and Microsoft as a whole has really impressed me these past couple years.

Anyway, thanks for all the work you have put into making the F# community one that is thriving and active! I see your name everywhere when I'm Googling for F# stuff and it's obvious you are one of those 20-percenters doing 80-percent of the work!

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