4 ms·

Can you expand on F# not being functional enough for the other 1%?

• Cybiote 7y ago
  I do not believe this generalization is accurate. It wasn't me who said that but the person I quoted. F# is plenty functional but what it does lack are organizational constructs which reduce code duplication. In practice, these are not deal breakers for what you get in return (especially that you can work around them by leveraging more OOP features, which isn't necessarily a bad thing) but that as always, depends on preferences and priorities. Among functional languages, F# is pretty streamlined, believe it or not. F#'s pragmatism means the subset of Haskell that gets used in practice to keep things simple shares a fair amount of overlap with F#. Even more-so for Ocaml. But, the person might have meant something like, if you already know Ocaml, you might complain about the lack of functors or polymorphic variants. Similarly, if you already know Haskell you might complain about the lack of higher-kinded types or GADTs. On the other hand, F# offers its own features (clean implementations of active patterns, computation expressions, type providers, async, multicore) and advantages, mostly from being able to leverage the .NET ecosystem (which also explains why those specific features are missing).