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Why F#?

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Re: Why F#?

#301

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.

Also note that the following is a valid Crystal-lang code:

   %w[Peter Julia Xi].map { |name| "Hello, #{name}" }.each { |greeting| puts "#{greeting}! Enjoy your Crystal" }
As they put it:

>Crystal is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. With syntax inspired by Ruby, it's a compiled language with static type-checking.

But this time, one can probably say that Crystal will lake the benefits of ecosystem that only a large popular language enjoy.

I guess on that side F#, relying on .Net, is closer to Kotlin with Java ecosystem.

Re: Why F#?

#302

Post by issafram »

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…

You're being way too nice. Java stream is nowhere near as easy to use as LINQ. I'd say that LINQ is easily one of the top 10 coding features that Microsoft has ever created.

Re: Why F#?

#303

Post by DeathArrow »

hocuspocus wrote: post #80
djtango wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - I'm curious where your thoughts are now on using FP/Scala in 2025? I've always looked at F# with envy as it is a hosted ML that will have extremely battle tested bindings to the important day to day stuff via C# (Darklang's stories of struggling with postgres and AWS when using OCaml was a good cautionary tale on the risks of using less common langs as a startup) Never had a chance to try out Scala but…

It's never been a better time to try Scala if you're interested in the FP side. It's still very much "not opinionated" but the community and ecosystem have benefited from a certain convergence and given up on the "better Java" front which is served by Kotlin more adequately. Of course you can still consume any Java library when needed but it's best to avoid it if possible. Today you can pick between several ecosystem…

So, there is a gazillion ways to do things and the community didn't settle on one? I don't find that very attractive when trying to learn a new language.

Re: Why F#?

#304

Post by winrid »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #295
mmoskal wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Stack Overflow developer survey [0] Rust is at 12.5%, roughly a half of C# or Java and a quarter of Python. Also more than twice Ruby. So definitely not niche. [0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

To be clear, that developer survey asked: > Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year? It does not ask if you are gainfully employed and using this language for your job. Also, in the same results, just above Rust, I see: > PowerShell 13.8% So, I guess that we can safely say that Microsoft Powe…

Powershell is probably more popular, it's used a lot for IT stuff so we never hear about it but it's there.

Re: Why F#?

#305

Post by DeathArrow »

darksaints wrote: post #219

I'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…

I would call .NET build system excellent.

Re: Why F#?

#306

Post by DeathArrow »

pimbrouwers wrote: post #46

Our shop converted 6 years ago, from C# to exclusively F#. I also author and maintain some packages (falco, donald, validus and others). The language is tough to learn if you're coming from a C-style language. But worth the effort and experience. It's extremely concise a true delight to build programs in that are fast, robust and durable. There are a few drawbacks, depending on your perspective: - compilation is slow…

>- there are very few opportunities to use it professionally

- hiring devs can be challenging

Those drawbacks are huge, IMO.

Re: Why F#?

#307

Post by MrMcCall »

akkad33 wrote: post #241
MrMcCall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's interesting. Thanks for the heads-up.

Re: Why F#?

#308

Post by saghm »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #291
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really minor point, but "strongly typed" and "statically typed" are not interchangeable terms. In the context of your comments here, you are exclusively interested in the static nature of the type system, rather than anything about the "strength" of it (which is something totally different and inconsistently defined).

Can you explain more about strongly typed vs statically typed?

Typically, "static typing" refers types being checked at compile time rather than runtime; in other words, the analysis can happen before the program is run, which gives you some degree of confidence in what the behavior will be when actually running it. The opposite of this is "dynamic typing", which means that the type-checking happens while the program is running, so you don't have the up-front guarantee that you won't end up having an error due to the wrong type being used somewhere. In practice, this isn't a strict binary where a language has to be 100% static or 100% dynamic. For example, Java is mostly statically typed, but there are some cases where things are a bit more dynamic (e.g the compiler allowing certain casts that might not end up being successful at runtime, at which point they throw an exception). On the other hand, Python traditionally has been a dynamically typed language, but in recent years there have various efforts to allow type annotations that allow checking some things in advance, which moves it a bit in the static direction (I'm not familiar enough with the current state of things in the ecosystem to have any insight into how much this has moved the needle).

On the other hand, "strong typing" isn't as quite as standardized in type systems terminology, but broadly speaking, it tends to be used to describe things like how "sound" a type system is (which is a well-defined concept in type systems theory), whether or not implicit type coercions can occur in the language, or other things that roughly translate to whether or not its possible for things to get misused as the wrong type without an explicit error occurring. Two examples that are commonly cited are JavaScript[0], with its sometimes confusion implicit conversions to allow things like adding an empty object and an empty array and getting the number 0 as the result (but not if added in the other order!) and C, with it being possible to interpret a value as whatever the equivalent underlying bytes would represent in an arbitrary type depending on the context its used.

[0]: I normally don't like to link to videos, but this famous comedic talk demonstrating a few of these JavaScript quirks is so thoroughly entertaining to watch again every few years that I feel like it's worth it so that those who haven't seen it before get a chance: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

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