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I used it in a computational finance class about a year ago. I develop solely on Linux, and although it was painful to get working, it definitely wasn't the wor

by icco 16y ago

I used it in a computational finance class about a year ago. I develop solely on Linux, and although it was painful to get working, it definitely wasn't the worst thing I have had to do on Linux... The actual language was weird. Apparently it was inspired by OCaml, but I felt it was far more verbose 90% of the time, and then randomly succinct. F#'s error messages were straight up useless. If you are looking for a good functional language, I would probably look elsewhere, but it does have the advantage that it is currently still being worked on, and it has all of the benefits that the CLR brings. At the very least, I agree with the other comment that it will probably bring more people into functional programming, which is always a good thing.

Dn_Ab 16y ago
A genuinely curious question with the subtext that I do not agree with you but wish to find out where you form your basis. The core languages of both are nearly identical (ignore active patterns, computation expressions, .net libs f# functors, polymorphic variants ocaml etc). You can port basic ocaml and F# code and only have to change letters here and there. What are your parameters for a Good functional language?
- icco 16y ago
  Well, I would specify a good functional language as one I enjoy coding in. So far that has been SML/NJ and Racket (PLT Scheme). For some reason I did not enjoy F#, and I blame that more on the strangeness of the .Net libraries than the syntax of the language. Also it has been a year, so maybe the language has changed / I don't entirely remember all of the problems I had.