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This is a reasonable article. I would like to address the part about the IDE though. All too often that discussion revolves around the advanced features of the

This is a reasonable article. I would like to address the part about the IDE though. All too often that discussion revolves around the advanced features of the IDE and how well it does project management. The part that's usually ignored in all that is how much overhead is involved with using a language. Not everything is a million-line enterprise banking project with 27 developers trying to integrate their work. The ability to write a program without an IDE and without configuring a project is gold. If I want to write an R script, for instance, it's nice to open a text editor and start typing. I don't need a fancy IDE or any project configuration.

everyone 5y ago
Opening visual studio is harder than opening a text editor??
- mftb 5y ago
  Yes. Reasons; Project files going back many years and many versions of VS. These files may have been "auto-upgraded" several times. Dependency changes, locations, versions, etc... Login requirements, to SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint, various cloud things. Memory requirements, old VMs on old, overloaded VM hosts. This on a team that expended a fair amount of effort to manage and improve these things. On a long enough time line, they always creep back in. This isn't really meant as a knock of VS as much as the IDE approach.
hawthornio 5y ago
I find rich IDE features very useful for functional programming because it makes it much easier to track types via hover-over. I agree that lightweight setups are better, but being able to start a single file project with ease isn’t necessarily an indictment of IDE niceties.
vizzier 5y ago
Visual Studio Code + Ionide extension is much lighter weight than visual studio proper. FSX (fsharp script files) can then be written and executed directly and will cover this gap. Technically you don't need the former, you can pipe the FSX file directly into the fsharp interactive EXE that interprets them from notepad and console if you like.

everyone 5y ago

Opening visual studio is harder than opening a text editor??

mftb 5y ago
Yes. Reasons; Project files going back many years and many versions of VS. These files may have been "auto-upgraded" several times. Dependency changes, locations, versions, etc... Login requirements, to SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint, various cloud things. Memory requirements, old VMs on old, overloaded VM hosts. This on a team that expended a fair amount of effort to manage and improve these things. On a long enough time line, they always creep back in. This isn't really meant as a knock of VS as much as the IDE approach.

hawthornio 5y ago

I find rich IDE features very useful for functional programming because it makes it much easier to track types via hover-over. I agree that lightweight setups are better, but being able to start a single file project with ease isn’t necessarily an indictment of IDE niceties.

vizzier 5y ago

Visual Studio Code + Ionide extension is much lighter weight than visual studio proper. FSX (fsharp script files) can then be written and executed directly and will cover this gap. Technically you don't need the former, you can pipe the FSX file directly into the fsharp interactive EXE that interprets them from notepad and console if you like.