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Tour of F#

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Re: Tour of F#

#71

Post by vosper »

orderlyoctopus wrote: post #66
vosper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling with Clojure. I'm not sure it's due to not having a strong functional background; I think it might be the reality of interop between very different languages.

Definitely. Understanding Clojure/Java interop to consume a library requires that you understand both Clojure and Java far more than you would need to if you were to consume a library native to whatever you were using.

That's one of the reasons I gave up on Clojure, though I think it could be a good option if you're coming from the Java world.

Re: Tour of F#

#73

Post by knocte »

ice109 wrote: post #58
sigstoat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F# works fine for me on linux. what is it you're after?

well i mean there's all this stuff i vaguely see about .NET Core not being as good as the offering on windows but that eventually it will be? i don't know C# but i'm interested. i guess i'm just wondering if i should make the leap to starting to learn it even though i develop solely on linux.

We (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541679#up_13548091) use F# in Linux and works very well.

Re: Tour of F#

#74

Post by throwaway7645 »

orderlyoctopus wrote: post #64
problems wrote: post #17

The problem I had going into this without a strong functional background is that often times to do practical things you're forced to work with .NET libraries - these .NET libraries are not nice functional libraries and don't encourage you to think functionally. Eventually I felt like everything I wrote was wrong and I just gave up on it.

I definitely agree. Trying to jump into F# without any knowledge of .NET just requires so much mind-juggling. As a beginner, so much of the difficulty and frustration comes from the fact that you are missing so much foundation knowledge that you don't know what to ask or look for, and may not even recognize the answer. Interop won't look or behave or be optimized how you expect and will just wreak havoc with your att…

I can't upvote your comment enough. Learning F# w/o .NET and Clojure without JVM knowledge is next to impossible. There is no good doc despite what people say (and I own several books in this space). Scott W's F# articles are great for foundational FP, but neither that, any of the F# books, or any of the online tutorials show me how to do even simple things like iterate through a file. I'd love to see "Basic Office Programming in F#".

Re: Tour of F#

#75

Post by smoothdeveloper »

orderlyoctopus wrote: post #69
smoothdeveloper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is that putting together short helpers for the "nasty" bits often revolve around 1 line helpers. You can do so along the way without focusing so much on doing idiomatic FP and achieve both pragmatic and palatable results. Designing solutions with the type system enabled by F# and it's ability to interop with whole .NET ecosystem is really a powerful combination.

It's very hard to do it along the way if you aren't familiar with C# either. Now you're struggling to get your head around both paradigms as well as however the thing you're trying to do works. I doubt I would have ever stuck with Clojure longer than a day, for example, if it wasn't for this library. It's not very long and all the functions are very short, but it meant that everything I needed from the file system wa…

> It's very hard to do it along the way if you aren't familiar with C# either.

Which I keep overlooking with so many years of C#, I'm so sorry about that :(

That being said, looking at the .NET framework documentation and hanging out on fsharp.org's slack might be a good way to make up for what you are missing to get started.

Re: Tour of F#

#76

Post by yawaramin »

sp33der89 wrote: post #68
bsamuels wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unit annotation is F#'s secret killer feature. I did a small video game in F# using unit annotation and was shocked at the number of bugs that unit annotation picks up at compile time. If you work with a lot of unit conversions (pixels, inches, whatever), I highly recommend giving F# a shot on a small project. Unit annotation + access to the .NET ecosystem has made this language a personal favorite for any project he…

How was your experience with F# and game development? I like F#'s syntax so much more than C#(plus some stuff like pattern matching are so nice). However I feel like FP isn't effective for gamedev.

You can do imperative and object-oriented programming with F# :-) Here's an example with a Windows Forms button which modifies a string variable on click:

    let mutable greeting = ""
    let btn_say_hi = new Button(Text = "Say Hi", Parent = frm_main)

    btn_say_hi.Click.Add(fun _ -> greeting

Re: Tour of F#

#77

Post by yawaramin »

aashishkoirala wrote: post #39

I know it's already been mentioned, but I just wanted to endorse https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ again - you could not ask for a better teacher than Scott Wlaschin if you want to learn F#.

It's a great resource for F#. If you also want to get really strong in functional programming fundamentals I highly recommend taking Prof. Dan Grossman's free online course https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages/ --he's a great teacher and the subject matter is great for all levels of experience.

Re: Tour of F#

#78

Post by yawaramin »

ultrahate wrote: post #48
ultrahate wrote: post #43

I realize that .NET is F#'s biggest strength from the perspective that Microsoft probably holds of trying to push C# more functional, and trying to attract talent from R, Ocaml, Rust, Julia, Haskell, etc, but it also feels like its biggest weakness. I'd love to see some sort of bootstrapped version that makes use of .NET Native or CoreRT or whatever they use today, and I'd REALLY like to see a strong Stdlib for F# th…

Edit: just before somebody starts whining about it, I ain't got no problems with NET on its own, but the barrier to proficiency in it from a functional universe is needlessly high, and if F# had a stronger core it would be something non NET programmers could pick up along the way rather than continuously bash their heads into while doing rather menial work. I don't want to sound whiny either but it's such a punch in…

Perhaps you're missing http://fsprojects.github.io/FSharpx.Extras/ ?

Re: Tour of F#

#79

Post by jackfoxy »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #74
orderlyoctopus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree. Trying to jump into F# without any knowledge of .NET just requires so much mind-juggling. As a beginner, so much of the difficulty and frustration comes from the fact that you are missing so much foundation knowledge that you don't know what to ask or look for, and may not even recognize the answer. Interop won't look or behave or be optimized how you expect and will just wreak havoc with your att…

I can't upvote your comment enough. Learning F# w/o .NET and Clojure without JVM knowledge is next to impossible. There is no good doc despite what people say (and I own several books in this space). Scott W's F# articles are great for foundational FP, but neither that, any of the F# books, or any of the online tutorials show me how to do even simple things like iterate through a file. I'd love to see "Basic Office P…

For what it is worth, the Microsoft docs are getting easier to navigate. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ They are currently putting a lot of effort into docs. It's got to be hard to learn .NET from zero. Try figuring out which namespaces are the most common and start browsing the docs.

Re: Tour of F#

#80

Post by ultrahate »

smoothdeveloper wrote: post #63
ultrahate wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: just before somebody starts whining about it, I ain't got no problems with NET on its own, but the barrier to proficiency in it from a functional universe is needlessly high, and if F# had a stronger core it would be something non NET programmers could pick up along the way rather than continuously bash their heads into while doing rather menial work. I don't want to sound whiny either but it's such a punch in…

What is needed is new blood among F# users, not coming from C# background and not too snob about F# not having most advanced type system when compared to Haskell or other similar ML languages. Then, effort on making functionally orientated base libraries (without relying on baking those things in FSharp.Core, but as set of small libraries) wrapping undelrying .NET APIs, taking inspiration from what is there in Haskel…

I agree mostly but I'd argue that most F# devs are coming from c# to begin with. I'd love to see some data suggesting otherwise, but I have a very strong feeling that its true. I also like multi paradigm, doesn't take away from F# at all, but it's something that doesn't mix well with developers not familiar with the NETverse
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