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Why F#?

batsov.com

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Re: Why F#?

#51

Post by gwbas1c »

> Why F#?

I'm kinda wondering if anyone here with decent C#/.net experience can give their version of the answer?

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The article really didn't answer its own question. It basically says "How" instead of "Why"...

...Which as someone who's spent over 20 years in C#, and tends to advocate for "functional" style, leaves me with more questions than answers!

Re: Why F#?

#52

Post by BiteCode_dev »

pdimitar wrote: post #36

People will do anything except actually try Elixir. :D ...I mean: pipes, immutability, transparent mega-parallelism... helloooo? I tried F# some years ago (after I was fired from a shop that decided they will go all-in on Java and F# and dropping everything else overnight) and I was not impressed. I mean the language is really nice but the C# baggage and runtime was just a bit much. And I was not left convinced that…

If one need to get on Beam, is it better to start on Elixir or Gleam?

Re: Why F#?

#53

Post by gwbas1c »

If you've had C# and F# co-exist in the same codebase, how do they co-exist? Is it like C# and VB.Net where a project (dll) is either C# or VB.Net, and they can reference each other?

Or: Is it more like the Swift / Objective C ecosystem where Swift, Objective C, and even straight C can co-exist in the same library?

In a mixed C# and F# codebase, generally when do you favor C# versus F#?

Coming from a C# background, what are the areas where F# is a better language?

Any success stories for F#, especially if it co-exists with C#? Any horror stories?

Re: Why F#?

#54

Post by afavour »

rockyj wrote: post #29

I did try F#, but I was new to .NET ecosystem. For 1 "hello world" I was quite surprised by how many project files and boilerplate was generated by .NET, which put me off. I am all for FP, immutable, and modern languages. But then where are the jobs and which companies care if you write good code? Now everyone wants languages which are easy to use with AI, while reducing workforce and "increased productivity". I have…

Opportunities do exist, even when they’re few and far between. I learned Rust in my spare time because I was really interested in it. Then we stumbled across something that would have really benefitted from a cross platform library and lo and behold, I got to use my Rust knowledge, even though the vast majority of my day job doesn’t use it.

Re: Why F#?

#55

Post by neonsunset »

rockyj wrote: post #29

I did try F#, but I was new to .NET ecosystem. For 1 "hello world" I was quite surprised by how many project files and boilerplate was generated by .NET, which put me off. I am all for FP, immutable, and modern languages. But then where are the jobs and which companies care if you write good code? Now everyone wants languages which are easy to use with AI, while reducing workforce and "increased productivity". I have…

As sibling comment pointed out, it's just .fsproj manifest and Program.fs file. What boilerplate do you speak of? It's on the opposite end boilerplate-wise to projects made in e.g. Java or TypeScript.

For F#, projects are needed to make full applications or libraries. Otherwise, you can simply write F# scripts with .fsx and execute them via 'dotnet fsi {SomeScript.fsx}'.

(obviously you can also specify dotnet fsi as shebang and integrate these scripts into general scripting on Unix systems - it's very productive)

Re: Why F#?

#56

Post by phplovesong »

Last time i tried F# i got bit by the weird concurrency story. There was async/task and somwhow they did not play well together. Also the dev tooling (for vim) was subpar, compared to ocaml (lsp). Compile times also was on the slower side.

Re: Why F#?

#57

Post by djtango »

lihaoyi wrote: post #6

I learned F# in 2013 and had a lot of fun with it, some of that code remains on Github (e.g. a 2D platformer game for windows https://github.com/lihaoyi/FSharpMetro/tree/master/Applicati... ). My experience was that it was a surprisingly nice language with a surprisingly warty user experience: papercuts ranging from naming conventions and function call styles (`|> List.map` vs `.Select`), basic syntax (`foo.[0]` to l…

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 am a seasoned Clojurian, as an outsider it seemed Scala suffered a little from being not opinionated enough so the ML family has been more appealing to tinker with even though Scala supports type classes out the box and will also have great ecosystem support via the JVM

Re: Why F#?

#58

Post by neonsunset »

phplovesong wrote: post #56

Last time i tried F# i got bit by the weird concurrency story. There was async/task and somwhow they did not play well together. Also the dev tooling (for vim) was subpar, compared to ocaml (lsp). Compile times also was on the slower side.

If you use task { } CE's you will get really good UX (it is recommended to use them over async CE's). They were introduced in F# 6.0 to address outstanding interoperability issues. As of now, writing asynchronous code is more convenient than C# (which is more convenient than Go or other languages which are less expressive w.r.t. writing highly concurrent code).

Re: Why F#?

#59

Post by twodave »

In 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.

Re: Why F#?

#60

Post by twodave »

neonsunset wrote: post #55
rockyj wrote: post #29

I did try F#, but I was new to .NET ecosystem. For 1 "hello world" I was quite surprised by how many project files and boilerplate was generated by .NET, which put me off. I am all for FP, immutable, and modern languages. But then where are the jobs and which companies care if you write good code? Now everyone wants languages which are easy to use with AI, while reducing workforce and "increased productivity". I have…

As sibling comment pointed out, it's just .fsproj manifest and Program.fs file. What boilerplate do you speak of? It's on the opposite end boilerplate-wise to projects made in e.g. Java or TypeScript. For F#, projects are needed to make full applications or libraries. Otherwise, you can simply write F# scripts with .fsx and execute them via 'dotnet fsi {SomeScript.fsx}'. (obviously you can also specify dotnet fsi as…

I suspect they were either referring to pre-.NET Core days before the new project formats came out or they're creating projects in Visual Studio and checking all the optional boxes. There indeed did used to be a lot more required boilerplate to get some code running. Now you can run a .NET project quite nicely in VS Code with 2 total files.
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