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Why F#?

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Re: Why F#?

#331

Post by kqr »

blatantly wrote: post #313
kqr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about libraries though? They might force you to use certain monads rather than IO?

The libraries I use either have, or at least allow, IO at the base of their transformer stacks, so any IO action is a liftIO away.

Re: Why F#?

#332

Post by DeathArrow »

JohnyTex wrote: post #146
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..)?

Personally I think F# is excellent for writing ye olde CRUD applications, especially as the business logic becomes more complex. F# is really good at domain modeling, as creating types comes with minimal overhead. C# has improved a lot in this area (eg record types) but it’s still got a long way to go. I wrote a tutorial about how to get up and running with web dev in F# that might be of interest: https://functionals…

Thank you, for someone interested in using F#, that is great.

I see you use Giraffe but I wonder how hard would it be to use Web API or to mix F# projects with C# projects in the same solution.

Re: Why F#?

#333

Post by DeathArrow »

piokoch wrote: post #9
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..)?

"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.

If we consider number of jobs, it's probably on par with Rust.

Re: Why F#?

#335

Post by [deleted] »

raphinou wrote: post #152
innocentoldguy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Elixir getting a strong type system is interesting, but watch out for gleam though But they still miss the computation expressions, which open interesting possibilities like https://github.com/CaptnCodr/Fli and https://github.com/fsprojects/FsHttp

[deleted]

Re: Why F#?

#336

Post by dboreham »

kstrauser wrote: post #216
johnisgood wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I will always prefer C's simplicity to Rust's complexity. Could be just me.

I find Rust vastly simpler than C. If the code compiles, it's probably a valid expression of the business logic I encoded. I might've screwed up that logic, of course, and no language can prevent me from messing that up. I know! Many have tried, and I've defeated them with my ability to misrepresent my ideas! But at least with Rust, I'm reasonably confident that the code will actually do the thing I asked it to do. I…

This seems...a very contrarian sentiment. Imho while C might lead you to create slightly fragile code once in a while, Rust is something like two orders of magnitude more complex.

Re: Why F#?

#337

Post by johnisgood »

noahbp wrote: post #279
Lyngbakr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Not Dune exactly, but having to run 'eval $(opam env)' in the terminal every time you open an OCaml project rather than the default being npm-like, where you can just open the directory and use the package manager command without having to think about it.

The only issues I've had with OCaml's build system is using "ocamlopt", "ocamlbuild", "ocamlfind" manually, but this was solved by OASIS and now Dune. I don't need to think about it. It automatically compiles when I save the file in Emacs. Very easy to set it up (one time setup).

Re: Why F#?

#338

Post by DeathArrow »

GiorgioG wrote: post #47

As a 20+ year C# developer I’ve tried several times to learn/use F#. Despite being interested in FP, my brain is having trouble figuring out how to structure my code in F#. In C# I’d either build a service (or use the mediator pattern) for the domain and a repository for data access. With F# it’s functions all the way down and it feels unnatural (as silly as that may sound).

Have you tried using a book or a tutorial to see how things can be done using idiomatic F#?

Re: Why F#?

#339

Post by DeathArrow »

MrMcCall wrote: post #161
jasonthorsness wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried F# when it was first released and was not a fan, but it sounds like that impression is a little outdated. C# has come so far in that time it’s almost a new language. I’ll have to take another look.

I don't know what C# has for an interactive prompt nowadays, but F#'s commandline environment, via its fsi.exe, was a revelation back then. It prevented having to have entire solutions to contain test projects to explore different areas of the vast .NET framework, especially when just learning how to use specific methods or objects.

For C# you can use LINQpad, a .NET scratchpad. You can even mix and match F# in it.

Re: Why F#?

#340

Post by Rohansi »

jadenPete wrote: post #278
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…

It’s always puzzled me that so many languages have their own build systems and package managers. Why aren’t programming language-agnostic build systems like Bazel and Buck more popular? It seems so strange that every new programming language essentially has to reinvent the wheel multiple times, inventing a new build system, package manager, formatter, linter, etc. I wonder if we’ll ever see something like LLVM for th…

Because there are differences that go beyond just the language syntax. The build processes are very different for C++ vs. C#, vs. F#, etc.

C++: invoke compiler for all compilation units, invoke linker to combine object files into executable

C#: invoke compiler once with all source files listed

F#: same as C# AFAIK, except file order matters!

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