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I'm glad they're simply turning C# into F#. They're coming to us where we are, rather than forcing us to make a jump. I'm a relatively "blue collar" developer,

I'm glad they're simply turning C# into F#. They're coming to us where we are, rather than forcing us to make a jump. I'm a relatively "blue collar" developer, I know a little about FP (not enough to be productive in F#) but I have tons of C# experience. I appreciate them taking the good stuff from F# and making it understandable to C# developers. It's been a delightful progression; no big jumps, no paradigm shifts, just the steady addition of useful new features that I can understand.

Eji1700 2y ago
So the issue for those of us in F# land, is that it's really not a big jump from C#. I've taught it (lightly) to at least one C# dev who basically picked it up in a weekend. Something that helps, a ton, is as you're transitioning, you can write code almost identically to how you did before. It doesn't force FP on you at all. It's less useful if you try to do that, because you're not taking advantage of the language, but it makes testing your beliefs on how things work SUPER easy because you can set it up in the OOP way, get the result you expect, then set up in what you think is the correct FP way, and see if it matches. The only issue is there's a severe lack of beginner friendly documentation (although it's leagues better than it used to be). I honestly think that if you're a C# dev, it's probably worth giving it a weekend or two to play with. ESPECIALLY if you like linq syntax.
progmetaldev 2y ago
I agree with you, as far as adding new features to C# from F#. When I have the time to refactor larger codebases, I'm often finding new C# features/syntax makes the code easier to understand and reason about (often due to decreasing the number of lines needed to accomplish the same thing, without overcomplicating things). I do make sure that if I'm introducing new language features, that I'm refactoring related portions of code, so I'm not leaving behind the "old" way of doing things while also introducing the "new" way for the same functionality. I'm always thinking of the next developer with anger issues coming into the codebase after me.
freilanzer 2y ago
> I'm glad they're simply turning C# into F#. I'm not. I find F#s syntax much more pleasing and elegant, and I'm afraid F# will wither away when C# is a watered down version of it.

Eji1700 2y ago

So the issue for those of us in F# land, is that it's really not a big jump from C#. I've taught it (lightly) to at least one C# dev who basically picked it up in a weekend. Something that helps, a ton, is as you're transitioning, you can write code almost identically to how you did before. It doesn't force FP on you at all. It's less useful if you try to do that, because you're not taking advantage of the language, but it makes testing your beliefs on how things work SUPER easy because you can set it up in the OOP way, get the result you expect, then set up in what you think is the correct FP way, and see if it matches. The only issue is there's a severe lack of beginner friendly documentation (although it's leagues better than it used to be). I honestly think that if you're a C# dev, it's probably worth giving it a weekend or two to play with. ESPECIALLY if you like linq syntax.

progmetaldev 2y ago

I agree with you, as far as adding new features to C# from F#. When I have the time to refactor larger codebases, I'm often finding new C# features/syntax makes the code easier to understand and reason about (often due to decreasing the number of lines needed to accomplish the same thing, without overcomplicating things). I do make sure that if I'm introducing new language features, that I'm refactoring related portions of code, so I'm not leaving behind the "old" way of doing things while also introducing the "new" way for the same functionality. I'm always thinking of the next developer with anger issues coming into the codebase after me.

freilanzer 2y ago

> I'm glad they're simply turning C# into F#. I'm not. I find F#s syntax much more pleasing and elegant, and I'm afraid F# will wither away when C# is a watered down version of it.