7 ms·

If this were really true though, then wouldn't F# be bigger than it is?

ipiz0618 4y ago
F# is a fantastic language! However, its official documentation is a bit lacking (like the C# ones). Also having developed some reactive applications I'd say .NET core needs some improvements before people can have fun developing desktop or web apps with it
mm007emko 4y ago
Exactly. Functional programming has been around for quite a while, it just recently became the FAD of the day, just search youtube for "functional programming in javascript". This will fade away in just a couple of years. F# is an interesting language and yes, I used it at work a couple of times. However finding a programmer who is into that is hard and the HR "partners" will kill you because people like these can't be treated as cheap replaceable resources. So it was F# prototype -> C# production. Attempts to introduce a new language or a tech stack usually failed because the decision makers (managers) were concerned about "how many people can I hire within a month" than anything else - nobody was fired for picking Java, C# or JavaScript (TypeScript) for the next project and staffing accordingly. Languages like OCaml, Haskell, Lisp (whatever flavour you pick) or Prolog will never become mainstream. Should they even? My favourite is one of them for my general hacking or research projects; not sure I'd like to use it in a corporate job (which I have right now). Small efficient team in a tech start-up? Hell yeah! Mainstream mundane programming? OMG NO! Horses for courses. Hearses are not mainstream vehicles yet all of us will need a ride in one occasionally. Does it mean they should become popular and mainstream? :-D
- nouveaux 4y ago
  Functional programming is not just the FAD of the day. This is evident by the strong presence of functional programming in Rust, an imperative language. Functional programming is also the foundational idea behind React. As with most things in life, extreme ends of the spectrum rarely pan out. Pure functional programming languages are harder to work with but functional programming has a ton of merit. It's here to stay. Regarding Ocaml, the functional aspect of the language is not hard. I have trained several junior programmers to write code in it (ReasonML). It is not a pure functional language. The biggest challenge for most people is dealing with types. Ocaml's standard library is a huge sore point. It also lacks a lot of proper tooling. The biggest problem with Ocaml/ReasonML is that they are unable to rally everyone to a unifying vision to gain traction.
  - Kototama 4y ago
    The alternative Base/Core from Jane Streets looks good though. Of course it splits the community but the work done on it is very good.
    - occamrazor 4y ago
      They’re great, but Base is new(ish) and not complete and Core is Linux only (maybe it work on OS X too?)
      - rbjorklin 4y ago
        The Unix bits were broken out of core earlier this year, it’s now multi-platform. https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-v0-15-release-of-jane-street-packages/9612 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-v0-15-release-of-jane-street...
        occamrazor 4y ago
        That’s great to hear, I missed that update (still on 0.14).
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - mm007emko 4y ago
    I dare to disagree - I still think that functional programming is a FAD of the day right now. Like object oriented was the FAD of the day in the 1990s and many then procedural languages saw OOP extensions on top of them (Perl where you need a bless() to work with an object? :-D ) and some even were like "yeah everything is an object so let's wrap every procedure into a class and use Command Pattern instead of closures and build a Kingdom of Nouns where people will name their classes after design patterns and everything will be perfect with a cup of hot Java"). Nowadays C++ has closures. What will become the FAD of the day in 10 years? Will wee see embedded Prolog in C# 12 or C++31? Who knows? Like OOP has been with us since 1968? and hasn't disappeared anywhere, functional programming features will not disappear from mainstream languages. But the "cool new shiny silver bullet" will be something else. Like Simula-68 and Smalltalk-80 paved way for OOP, Haskell and OCaml (et. al.) have been paving way for functional programming and Prolog and Datalog have been paving way for logical programming. They won't become mainstream when logical programming becomes the FAD of the day. BTW you mentioned you taught a couple of junior programmers an ML-ish language. That's awesome! We all (programming community) need more legends like you.
- Kototama 4y ago
  It's not about functional programming, it's about managing state. And FP is good at managing state, so no it's not going away, specially with multiple cores and distributed systems. Even databases are learning from the patterns seen in FP.
- sunflowerdeath 4y ago
  But wait, OCaml is not just a functional language, even the "O" in its name stands for "Objective".
- ngrilly 4y ago
  That doesn’t explain why languages like Go, Kotlin or Rust became mainstream, and why languages like OCaml or F# didn’t. This is the real question. Is it because most programmers prefer languages that are mainly imperative instead of functional? Is it because of where those languages originated? Is it because of the runtime, the tools, the documentation and/or the standard library, and not the language itself?
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    I think its because influential companies in the tech space pushed them. For instance, Go is backed by Google, and they made alot of rounds evangelizing Go. Kotlin is a Jetbrains project and it certainly didn't hurt that Google made Kotlin the preferred language over Java for development on Android, and that Kotlin itself has great Java ecosystem compatibility. For years, Rust was Mozilla's baby, and they did a lot of good work evangelizing Rust for its use case, and other companies adopted it as well, continuing the cycle. There is nothing I can think of that is comparable for F#, OCaml, Haskell and many other fine languages
    - ngrilly 4y ago
      The corporate backing is a good working hypothesis for C, C++, Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Swift, Dart, JavaScript, TypeScript and Rust. But it doesn't explain how PHP, Python and Ruby became mainstream. Maybe those ones are just outliers, products of a very special period of time when "dynamic" programming languages were popular (and it's easier for a small team to develop such a language) and when the web was growing very fast (and many devs were bored with the "ceremony" of "static" programming languages like Java).
      - runevault 4y ago
        PHP I feel like was mostly all the old web providers you could sign up for to run your own site always had LAMP stacks available as options either default installed or trivially installable, often with instructions. Ruby I'm not sure what caused the hype unless it was something like Heroku making deployable Rails easy.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
F# is great and it benefits from the .net ecosystem but at the same time the language sometimes feels like it is being held back now by not wanting to add new features that c# doesn't support, so its relation to .net is kind of both a blessing and a curse. Previously it added a lot of stuff on its own like async, etc. which was cool but also resulted in compatibility issues when c# later added similar features. Now the f# developers are very concerned with compatibility but it basically means that f# can't get new features until c# already has them. It's also limited by the runtime which is designed around c#. For example, it doesn't support type classes because (among other reasons) that might end up being incompatible with future c# type-class like features several years down the line. It's also hard to learn f# unless you already know some ocaml/haskell. ocaml has failed to catch on that much so far but I think it does have potential, and adding multicore support/effects is pretty promising. On the other hand the fragmentation with stuff like reason/rescript is pretty dumb.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  From a pure pro-ocaml perspective I don't really appreciate rescript per se. But it truly does seemed to have raised awareness of the language among web devs who otherwise don't have a reason to worry about much outside of js/ts. The timing is also good because typescript has directly shown devs the value of types, and taught them enough about them to understand what ocaml is really offering above ts-style static type checking. That's my impression from my last two typescript jobs, anyway. I don't know what, if anything, will come out of this, but I can't see it being bad.
  - cassepipe 4y ago
    I am curious. What does Rescript have that Reason did not have ? I know the syntax is now incompatible syntax with OCaml so I see the broken eggs but I don't see the omelet.
    - resoluteteeth 4y ago
      I don't think it's that different at the moment but they apparently wanted to not be constrained by reason/ocaml compatibility going forward. Reason seems to be pretty dead so now the relationship between ocaml and rescript is kind of like that between haskell and purescript. This may be good if you only want to run it on the frontend but it's not as good if you're using ocaml on the backend and want to share code, but I guess there's js_of_ocaml I also don't think the existence of rescript is in itself a bad thing, it's just that the whole confusion around reason/rescript may have harmed development of ocaml for a while.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 4y ago
F# suffers from being a stepchild in what concerns .NET product management. They accepted to place it on the box, but never gave it the same love as VB and C#, or even C++/CLI, and now they could rename the Common Language Runtime into C# Language Runtime, given how little outside they give to anything not C# on newer workloads. Had F# been given feature parity with C# and VB on Visual Studio tooling and core frameworks, the adoption scenario would be much different.
lostdog 4y ago
F# can't become big for the same reason C# isn't bigger and Swift probably won't be bigger either. It's locked into an OS-specific platform and very specific non-free dev tools. (Even if .net is open now, it still took too long to be available on Linux, and now it's reputation is as a Windows only platform).
- nojito 4y ago
  F# isn't bigger because it's a functional language and everyone starts learning programming with a C based language.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    > everyone starts learning programming with a C-based language Idk about that, especially in the past decade. Python seems to be the most popular language that people pick up on their own as their first one. As for the intro college courses for programming, they mostly seem to be Python or Java, with occasional C (havent seen that one myself yet for an intro class), and one incidence of OCaml (apparently Cornell teach their intro to CS in it).
    - nojito 4y ago
      Python is in the C family of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programmi...

F# is a fantastic language! However, its official documentation is a bit lacking (like the C# ones). Also having developed some reactive applications I'd say .NET core needs some improvements before people can have fun developing desktop or web apps with it

mm007emko 4y ago

Exactly. Functional programming has been around for quite a while, it just recently became the FAD of the day, just search youtube for "functional programming in javascript". This will fade away in just a couple of years. F# is an interesting language and yes, I used it at work a couple of times. However finding a programmer who is into that is hard and the HR "partners" will kill you because people like these can't be treated as cheap replaceable resources. So it was F# prototype -> C# production. Attempts to introduce a new language or a tech stack usually failed because the decision makers (managers) were concerned about "how many people can I hire within a month" than anything else - nobody was fired for picking Java, C# or JavaScript (TypeScript) for the next project and staffing accordingly. Languages like OCaml, Haskell, Lisp (whatever flavour you pick) or Prolog will never become mainstream. Should they even? My favourite is one of them for my general hacking or research projects; not sure I'd like to use it in a corporate job (which I have right now). Small efficient team in a tech start-up? Hell yeah! Mainstream mundane programming? OMG NO! Horses for courses. Hearses are not mainstream vehicles yet all of us will need a ride in one occasionally. Does it mean they should become popular and mainstream? :-D

nouveaux 4y ago
Functional programming is not just the FAD of the day. This is evident by the strong presence of functional programming in Rust, an imperative language. Functional programming is also the foundational idea behind React. As with most things in life, extreme ends of the spectrum rarely pan out. Pure functional programming languages are harder to work with but functional programming has a ton of merit. It's here to stay. Regarding Ocaml, the functional aspect of the language is not hard. I have trained several junior programmers to write code in it (ReasonML). It is not a pure functional language. The biggest challenge for most people is dealing with types. Ocaml's standard library is a huge sore point. It also lacks a lot of proper tooling. The biggest problem with Ocaml/ReasonML is that they are unable to rally everyone to a unifying vision to gain traction.
- Kototama 4y ago
  The alternative Base/Core from Jane Streets looks good though. Of course it splits the community but the work done on it is very good.
  - occamrazor 4y ago
    They’re great, but Base is new(ish) and not complete and Core is Linux only (maybe it work on OS X too?)
    - rbjorklin 4y ago
      The Unix bits were broken out of core earlier this year, it’s now multi-platform. https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-v0-15-release-of-jane-street-packages/9612 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ann-v0-15-release-of-jane-street...
      - occamrazor 4y ago
        That’s great to hear, I missed that update (still on 0.14).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- mm007emko 4y ago
  I dare to disagree - I still think that functional programming is a FAD of the day right now. Like object oriented was the FAD of the day in the 1990s and many then procedural languages saw OOP extensions on top of them (Perl where you need a bless() to work with an object? :-D ) and some even were like "yeah everything is an object so let's wrap every procedure into a class and use Command Pattern instead of closures and build a Kingdom of Nouns where people will name their classes after design patterns and everything will be perfect with a cup of hot Java"). Nowadays C++ has closures. What will become the FAD of the day in 10 years? Will wee see embedded Prolog in C# 12 or C++31? Who knows? Like OOP has been with us since 1968? and hasn't disappeared anywhere, functional programming features will not disappear from mainstream languages. But the "cool new shiny silver bullet" will be something else. Like Simula-68 and Smalltalk-80 paved way for OOP, Haskell and OCaml (et. al.) have been paving way for functional programming and Prolog and Datalog have been paving way for logical programming. They won't become mainstream when logical programming becomes the FAD of the day. BTW you mentioned you taught a couple of junior programmers an ML-ish language. That's awesome! We all (programming community) need more legends like you.
Kototama 4y ago
It's not about functional programming, it's about managing state. And FP is good at managing state, so no it's not going away, specially with multiple cores and distributed systems. Even databases are learning from the patterns seen in FP.
sunflowerdeath 4y ago
But wait, OCaml is not just a functional language, even the "O" in its name stands for "Objective".
ngrilly 4y ago
That doesn’t explain why languages like Go, Kotlin or Rust became mainstream, and why languages like OCaml or F# didn’t. This is the real question. Is it because most programmers prefer languages that are mainly imperative instead of functional? Is it because of where those languages originated? Is it because of the runtime, the tools, the documentation and/or the standard library, and not the language itself?
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I think its because influential companies in the tech space pushed them. For instance, Go is backed by Google, and they made alot of rounds evangelizing Go. Kotlin is a Jetbrains project and it certainly didn't hurt that Google made Kotlin the preferred language over Java for development on Android, and that Kotlin itself has great Java ecosystem compatibility. For years, Rust was Mozilla's baby, and they did a lot of good work evangelizing Rust for its use case, and other companies adopted it as well, continuing the cycle. There is nothing I can think of that is comparable for F#, OCaml, Haskell and many other fine languages
  - ngrilly 4y ago
    The corporate backing is a good working hypothesis for C, C++, Java, C#, Go, Kotlin, Swift, Dart, JavaScript, TypeScript and Rust. But it doesn't explain how PHP, Python and Ruby became mainstream. Maybe those ones are just outliers, products of a very special period of time when "dynamic" programming languages were popular (and it's easier for a small team to develop such a language) and when the web was growing very fast (and many devs were bored with the "ceremony" of "static" programming languages like Java).
    - runevault 4y ago
      PHP I feel like was mostly all the old web providers you could sign up for to run your own site always had LAMP stacks available as options either default installed or trivially installable, often with instructions. Ruby I'm not sure what caused the hype unless it was something like Heroku making deployable Rails easy.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

F# is great and it benefits from the .net ecosystem but at the same time the language sometimes feels like it is being held back now by not wanting to add new features that c# doesn't support, so its relation to .net is kind of both a blessing and a curse. Previously it added a lot of stuff on its own like async, etc. which was cool but also resulted in compatibility issues when c# later added similar features. Now the f# developers are very concerned with compatibility but it basically means that f# can't get new features until c# already has them. It's also limited by the runtime which is designed around c#. For example, it doesn't support type classes because (among other reasons) that might end up being incompatible with future c# type-class like features several years down the line. It's also hard to learn f# unless you already know some ocaml/haskell. ocaml has failed to catch on that much so far but I think it does have potential, and adding multicore support/effects is pretty promising. On the other hand the fragmentation with stuff like reason/rescript is pretty dumb.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
From a pure pro-ocaml perspective I don't really appreciate rescript per se. But it truly does seemed to have raised awareness of the language among web devs who otherwise don't have a reason to worry about much outside of js/ts. The timing is also good because typescript has directly shown devs the value of types, and taught them enough about them to understand what ocaml is really offering above ts-style static type checking. That's my impression from my last two typescript jobs, anyway. I don't know what, if anything, will come out of this, but I can't see it being bad.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  I am curious. What does Rescript have that Reason did not have ? I know the syntax is now incompatible syntax with OCaml so I see the broken eggs but I don't see the omelet.
  - resoluteteeth 4y ago
    I don't think it's that different at the moment but they apparently wanted to not be constrained by reason/ocaml compatibility going forward. Reason seems to be pretty dead so now the relationship between ocaml and rescript is kind of like that between haskell and purescript. This may be good if you only want to run it on the frontend but it's not as good if you're using ocaml on the backend and want to share code, but I guess there's js_of_ocaml I also don't think the existence of rescript is in itself a bad thing, it's just that the whole confusion around reason/rescript may have harmed development of ocaml for a while.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 4y ago

F# suffers from being a stepchild in what concerns .NET product management. They accepted to place it on the box, but never gave it the same love as VB and C#, or even C++/CLI, and now they could rename the Common Language Runtime into C# Language Runtime, given how little outside they give to anything not C# on newer workloads. Had F# been given feature parity with C# and VB on Visual Studio tooling and core frameworks, the adoption scenario would be much different.

lostdog 4y ago

F# can't become big for the same reason C# isn't bigger and Swift probably won't be bigger either. It's locked into an OS-specific platform and very specific non-free dev tools. (Even if .net is open now, it still took too long to be available on Linux, and now it's reputation is as a Windows only platform).

nojito 4y ago
F# isn't bigger because it's a functional language and everyone starts learning programming with a C based language.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > everyone starts learning programming with a C-based language Idk about that, especially in the past decade. Python seems to be the most popular language that people pick up on their own as their first one. As for the intro college courses for programming, they mostly seem to be Python or Java, with occasional C (havent seen that one myself yet for an intro class), and one incidence of OCaml (apparently Cornell teach their intro to CS in it).
  - nojito 4y ago
    Python is in the C family of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programmi...