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Why F#?

(batsov.com)
438 points bozhidar | 12 comments | 01 Apr 25 12:34 UTC | HN request time: 2.241s | source | bottom
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raphinou ◴[01 Apr 25 14:49 UTC] No.43547463[source]▶
F# was for me the best functional language when I looked at rewriting a Ruby on Rails app. I wanted to go with a functional language, as it seems to better fit my thinking and reasoning, and I looked at Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, F#.

Being a stranger to Microsoft technologies, F# was the least likely to be chosen, but easily became the first choice. Haskell's purity made it hard to adopt (for me), Ocaml's ecosystem is subpar (there wasn't even a clear choice for a library to interact with postgresql, I couldn't install the latest version due to its reliance on an obscure tool whose name I forgot and didn't get help on the forum), and Scala is seems complex....

F# was surprisingly easy to get started with. The community is mis-managed by a corporate-minded approach (requiring people to become member of the F# software foundation to get access to the official slack!), but its members are friendly, smart and ready to help. The ecosystem is great with access to all the dotnet libraries (some complain there's a mismatch as most of those are developed for use with C#, but I rarely got in trouble for using them).

There are also great libs and frameworks available. Like https://github.com/SchlenkR/FsHttp to easily interact with http servers, to the point that I find it easier to use than a dedicated library. Or https://github.com/CaptnCodr/Fli , to run commands. And last but not least, https://www.websharper.com/ is the best web framework I have encountered across all ecosystems. Their reactive approach to web ui really allows me to develop complex interfaces in a maintainable way.

This became a longer message than I thought, probably due to my enthousiasm for the language. For complete transparency, the situation is not perfect, and in my experience the tooling is not the best.

If you want more info, I blogged about it a couple of months ago: https://www.asfaload.com/blog/consider-fsharp/

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breadwinner ◴[01 Apr 25 15:41 UTC] No.43548126[source]▶
Apache Spark, Delta Lake are written Scala. Being JVM based, it has a large ecosystem. Scala seems like a better choice than F#.
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1. innocentoldguy ◴[01 Apr 25 16:02 UTC] No.43548391[source]▶
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

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2. raphinou ◴[01 Apr 25 16:09 UTC] No.43548470[source]▶
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

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3. innocentoldguy ◴[01 Apr 25 16:27 UTC] No.43548678[source]▶
Gleam lacks lisp-style macros, and its implementations of BEAM and OTP are not exhaustive. For example, Gleam does not support:

- Hot updates.

- Full distributed system support.

– Low-level process manipulation.

- Named processes.

- Advanced supervision strategies.

- Behaviours other than GenServer.

- Type-safe distributed messaging.

- And several other things that I value in BEAM and OTP.

I can't justify trading the full power of BEAM and OTP for static typing. To be fair, though, I've written a lot of code in both statically and dynamically typed languages, and static typing isn't something I value much (to the point that you might say I don't care about it at all :D).

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4. dkarl ◴[01 Apr 25 17:00 UTC] No.43549065[source]▶
> Every code base I've worked on in Scala has ended up being a hodgepodge of both

Is there something about that that has bothered you? Working in Scala codebases, I've found the best ones to work in are the ones that embrace Scala's multiparadigm nature. When programmers try to solve every problem with OO, they end up adding more and more layers to get the job done. When programmers try to solve every problem with FP, they end up resorting to sophisticated techniques that are unapproachable for other engineers. I think the simple parts of OO and the simple parts of FP go much, much further together than simple OO or simple FP can go by themselves. Have you seen something different?

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5. raphinou ◴[01 Apr 25 17:13 UTC] No.43549237{3}[source]▶
I knew otp was still suboptimal in gleam, but thanks for mentioning all these additional points!

Funny how preferences and priorities vary among devs, I need my static type system! :-) But note even in static type systems there are variations. I'm talking about an hindley milner type system with its type inference like the one in fsharp

6. michaelcampbell ◴[01 Apr 25 20:00 UTC] No.43550751[source]▶
Isn't Clojure similarly (or even moreso) multiparadigm?
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7. throw234234234 ◴[02 Apr 25 00:10 UTC] No.43552557[source]▶
Evaluated F# vs Clojure. Speed of certain algorithms just lacked for me. Value types particularly in tail recursive stacks shines in F# compared to the JVM in general. As usual YMMV
8. lucyjojo ◴[02 Apr 25 00:15 UTC] No.43552587[source]▶
i don't think it is. i would say it is functional + bridges to the jvm (which is why it has been ported to many other platforms... there is not that much stuff in the language itself).

it is functional (value) programming first. there are tools to hook in the object jvm stuff but this is not the natural grain of the language.

clojure is pretty much all values and functions (and some macroes).

+ some concurrency stuff

there is no class, there is no inheritance, you don't even have information hiding (no private etc.). you have protocols and multimethods.

(well technically there is private because java but it is not obvious to use and not what you expect, you will very rarely see that in clojure codebases)

honestly it is a nice small yet powerful language, with not too many kludges. my personal coding is either clojure or rust (which has way more kludges, but better than the other stuff in the typed fast compiled world at least for me).

9. felixyz ◴[02 Apr 25 10:30 UTC] No.43555317{3}[source]▶
My current preference is to use Elixir and its great ecosystem as the shell for my project, and implement the core business logic in Gleam.
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10. ◴[02 Apr 25 12:24 UTC] No.43555883[source]▶
11. vips7L ◴[02 Apr 25 17:54 UTC] No.43559348[source]▶
I really think this is where Kotlin is going to excel; multi-paradigm, multi-platform. Scala's community went too hard into FP and type-golfing to make it approachable.
12. innocentoldguy ◴[03 Apr 25 05:05 UTC] No.43564959{4}[source]▶
Why? The business logic part is where Elixir outshines Gleam the most, isn’t it? What do you gain by doing this?

(I am genuinely curious and not trying to be snarky.)