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Why F#?

(batsov.com)
438 points bozhidar | 3 comments | 01 Apr 25 12:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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eknkc ◴[01 Apr 25 12:45 UTC] No.43546122[source]▶
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..)?

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pjc50 ◴[01 Apr 25 13:05 UTC] No.43546333[source]▶
The funny thing is that you can write very similar code in C#, so maybe you don't need to switch which language you're using as a CLR frontend.

    using System.Linq;
    using System;

    var names = new string[] {"Peter", "Julia", "Xi" };
    names.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ToList().ForEach(greeting =>   Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#"));
LINQ is such a good library that I miss it in other languages. The Java stream equivalent just doesn't feel as fluent.
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psychoslave ◴[01 Apr 25 16:16 UTC] No.43548541[source]▶
As far as fluency goes, that’s not very impressive.

    %w{Peter Julia Xi}.map{"Hello, #{it}"}.each{puts "#{it}! Enjoy your Ruby"}
That’s of course trivial examples. And while Ruby now have RBS and Sorbet, it’s yet another tradeoff compared to a syntax that has upfront static analysis as first class citizen in mind.

That is, each language will have its strong and weak points, but so far on "fluency" I’m not aware of anything that really beat Ruby far beyond as Ruby does compared to other mainstream programming languages.

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int_19h ◴[01 Apr 25 16:44 UTC] No.43548883[source]▶
Ruby is dynamically typed, which makes "fluent" API design that much easier at the cost of maintainability elsewhere. If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to compare F# to other statically typed languages.
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1. psychoslave ◴[02 Apr 25 08:43 UTC] No.43554755[source]▶
Also note that the following is a valid Crystal-lang code:

   %w[Peter Julia Xi].map { |name| "Hello, #{name}" }.each { |greeting| puts "#{greeting}! Enjoy your Crystal" }
As they put it:

>Crystal is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. With syntax inspired by Ruby, it's a compiled language with static type-checking.

But this time, one can probably say that Crystal will lake the benefits of ecosystem that only a large popular language enjoy.

I guess on that side F#, relying on .Net, is closer to Kotlin with Java ecosystem.

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2. paddim8 ◴[02 Apr 25 12:55 UTC] No.43556129[source]▶
The only difference is that you have to specify the type of the list when you declare it though... That's not really a big deal.

List<string> names = ["Peter", "Julia", "Xi"]; names.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ForEach(greeting => Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#"))

or

new List<string> { "Peter", "Julia", "Xi" }.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ForEach(greeting => Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#"))

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3. psychoslave ◴[02 Apr 25 15:50 UTC] No.43558059[source]▶
Nothing is that much a big deal on a small selected sample, on the one hand on the other. That is, maybe some will prefer mandatory explicit type for every single variable, and some other will prefer type inference whenever possible, and both have pros and cons.

To jump in a REPL (or any debug breakpoint observation facility), having optional type inference is a great plus to my mind.

Note that Crystal does allow to make type explicit, and keep the fluent interface on track doing so:

    Array(String).new.push("Peter", "Julia", "Xi").map{|name| "Hello, #{name}"}.each{|greeting| puts "#{greeting}! Enjoy your Crystal"}
Let’s remark by the way that, like with C# lambda parameters, block parameters are not explicitly typed in that case.