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Unlike most commentors my experience with F# hasn't been stellar. I feel the language itself is well designed and the community is great but there is just so mu

Unlike most commentors my experience with F# hasn't been stellar. I feel the language itself is well designed and the community is great but there is just so much of it. Any source code that i try to go through is sprinkled with so many new keywords, so many different way of combining stuff, that there seems to be so many syntactical stuff going on. It is really making me struggle. It just feels like a language where the maintainers are going overboard with. And I am sure that once I understand it, I would love it, but the path to get there is so hard. Pretty much no tutorials or articles are out there and reading sources for small projects is not viable for me either due to the keyword noise and too many ways to do something. I did not feel anything like this when I taught myself python, ES6, lua, Crystal etc. F# just feels too big.

BeetleB 7y ago
>Pretty much no tutorials or articles are out there and reading sources for small projects is not viable for me either. The lack of a good online tutorial is a problem for me as well. F# For Fun and Profit is decent, but I've not found it a good substitute for a book/tutorial.
hoelle 7y ago
I agree, F# is hard to learn. It took me a few months of tinkering to be able to express myself in it. Good entry points: Don Syme - his "F# Code I Love" talk has been recorded a few times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2BAxG3bdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2BAxG3bdM. I recommend catching a few versions. Scott Wlaschin - His talks are also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQt1NAHYC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQt1NAHYC0. He also runs https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ which is a treasure trove. And I found Isaac Abraham's book excellent and breezy to read: https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp Now that I'm over the hump, I think F# code is far more readable than other languages I'm well versed in (C++/C#). Probably my favorite thing about F# is the strict top-down dependencies. You can open a project and read it in order, and understand it without having to hop around a bunch. And since most programs can be written in far fewer lines in F#, code written in it ends up feeling very small and economical.

BeetleB 7y ago

>Pretty much no tutorials or articles are out there and reading sources for small projects is not viable for me either. The lack of a good online tutorial is a problem for me as well. F# For Fun and Profit is decent, but I've not found it a good substitute for a book/tutorial.

hoelle 7y ago

I agree, F# is hard to learn. It took me a few months of tinkering to be able to express myself in it. Good entry points: Don Syme - his "F# Code I Love" talk has been recorded a few times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2BAxG3bdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2BAxG3bdM. I recommend catching a few versions. Scott Wlaschin - His talks are also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQt1NAHYC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQt1NAHYC0. He also runs https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ which is a treasure trove. And I found Isaac Abraham's book excellent and breezy to read: https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp Now that I'm over the hump, I think F# code is far more readable than other languages I'm well versed in (C++/C#). Probably my favorite thing about F# is the strict top-down dependencies. You can open a project and read it in order, and understand it without having to hop around a bunch. And since most programs can be written in far fewer lines in F#, code written in it ends up feeling very small and economical.