←back to thread

Why F#?

(batsov.com)
438 points bozhidar | 3 comments | 01 Apr 25 12:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
rockyj ◴[01 Apr 25 13:08 UTC] No.43546371[source]▶
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 been programming for 20 years and know 4-5 languages, in India it was worse but in EU at-least I can make a sustainable living by writing Java / TypeScript. I cannot even find jobs with Kotlin + TypeScript which pay well, forget getting jobs in Elixir / Clojure / F# (there maybe a handful of opportunities if I will relocate for around 70K/year). That is why I have mostly given up on learning niche languages.

replies(11): >>43546449 #>>43546522 #>>43546629 #>>43546648 #>>43546914 #>>43546918 #>>43547243 #>>43547274 #>>43547691 #>>43548828 #>>43553311 #
neonsunset ◴[01 Apr 25 13:37 UTC] No.43546648[source]▶
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)

replies(1): >>43546713 #
1. twodave ◴[01 Apr 25 13:45 UTC] No.43546713[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>43547401 #
2. shortrounddev2 ◴[01 Apr 25 14:45 UTC] No.43547401[source]▶
Well also if you're using Visual Studio it will generate solution files as well, not just fsproj. I grew up doing C/C++ so boilerplate project/IDE/make files as well as build objects are something I expect to see. I think people who work in primarily JIT'd/interpreted languages are used to just having a directory tree full of source files and having some CLI tool manage everything for them. Maybe a dependency list file as well, but that's about it. Python is like this, and javascript CAN be like this
replies(1): >>43560901 #
3. twodave ◴[02 Apr 25 20:02 UTC] No.43560901[source]▶
Yeah, overall I agree. And I honestly can't imagine anyone who works with any popular javascript framework would flinch at the addition of a .sln file or /Properties folder lol...