4 ms·

I would definitely consider it if the IDE tooling was stronger. Visual Studio and F# is ok, but not nearly as strong as for C#.

virmundi 11y ago
One my active questions in this area is "does FP need an IDE as much as OOP?" I don't know. When done properly FP decomposes into smaller, easier to thing about functions. They often get glued together in a piper->filter way. As a result, the glue logic doesn't really require much introspection. Where an IDE could be helpful is in refactoring and code generation. If your code does't require much generation due to its simplicity, you might need half-an-IDE. If you can get decent refactoring by having higher-level functions as the default, maybe you end only needing a quarter of an IDE? That's why I keep bouncing between LightTable and Counterclockwise (nope hate IntelliJ and Cursives, but that is a taste thing). I'm more comfortable with Eclipse than Light Table. I just don't know how much of it I need. One caveat is debugging. I do fallback on that. I think that might be a sign of me failing to breakdown my code into isolated units. Regardless, I haven't figured out how to do debugging in LightTable.
douche 11y ago
I'm trying to get into F#, but since I have a ReSharper license, it's hard for me to get away from C# - the tooling is just so nice. I would definitely say that learning more functional ways of writing code in F# makes my C# code much better. I don't know how much direct benefit I would get from using F# instead, though. Too much of the stuff I work on is dependent on using not-so-functional-friendly C#-based SDKs or ties into unmanaged code through COM wrappers.
Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
And you are on windows. The tooling for linux is awful. Monodevelop fails to compile if you add another F# source file to your project. You have to modify the project file manually to make the project compile correctly. I'm a huge fan of F#. I ported some old racket program to it, and ended up with a shorter, faster program that looked better. But constantly having to struggle with the tooling just makes me want to go back to DrRacket.

virmundi 11y ago

One my active questions in this area is "does FP need an IDE as much as OOP?" I don't know. When done properly FP decomposes into smaller, easier to thing about functions. They often get glued together in a piper->filter way. As a result, the glue logic doesn't really require much introspection. Where an IDE could be helpful is in refactoring and code generation. If your code does't require much generation due to its simplicity, you might need half-an-IDE. If you can get decent refactoring by having higher-level functions as the default, maybe you end only needing a quarter of an IDE? That's why I keep bouncing between LightTable and Counterclockwise (nope hate IntelliJ and Cursives, but that is a taste thing). I'm more comfortable with Eclipse than Light Table. I just don't know how much of it I need. One caveat is debugging. I do fallback on that. I think that might be a sign of me failing to breakdown my code into isolated units. Regardless, I haven't figured out how to do debugging in LightTable.

douche 11y ago

I'm trying to get into F#, but since I have a ReSharper license, it's hard for me to get away from C# - the tooling is just so nice. I would definitely say that learning more functional ways of writing code in F# makes my C# code much better. I don't know how much direct benefit I would get from using F# instead, though. Too much of the stuff I work on is dependent on using not-so-functional-friendly C#-based SDKs or ties into unmanaged code through COM wrappers.

Johnny_Brahms 11y ago

And you are on windows. The tooling for linux is awful. Monodevelop fails to compile if you add another F# source file to your project. You have to modify the project file manually to make the project compile correctly. I'm a huge fan of F#. I ported some old racket program to it, and ended up with a shorter, faster program that looked better. But constantly having to struggle with the tooling just makes me want to go back to DrRacket.