4 ms·

Amazing architecture; I remember reading about it and colorforth several years ago when I was researching parallel architectures. I almost want to buy a chip a

by jnbiche 13y ago

Amazing architecture; I remember reading about it and colorforth several years ago when I was researching parallel architectures. I almost want to buy a chip and mount it on a schmartboard, but I've got so much going on right now that I know it would probably sit there after that. The real reason for my comment, however, is a question: is that idiomatic F#? If so, I like it! It's got a lot of Haskell's succinctness, power, and functional goodness without becoming a tangled mess of indecipherable symbols. Yes, you can write Haskell this way, but in my experience, almost no one does. If this is typical for F#, it deserves a (very close) look. Add to that the fact that I was impressed with the readability and power of a bit of C# code the other day. I really got to give these MS languages another chance. It's too bad I can't stand the OS (and yes, I've tried Windows 8 -- even worse). How's Mono these days?

xmonkee 13y ago
Well F# is basically ML.net so why not check out OCaml? Same language, and no windows required.
- ygra 13y ago
  F# runs perfectly fine on Mono. No Windows required there, either.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- profquail 13y ago
  F# is an ML implementation for .NET; being an ML-based lanaguage, it shares many similarities with OCaml, but as I pointed out yesterday, it is definitely not the same thing as OCaml: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660947
- bunderbunder 13y ago
  Basically, yes. But in detail, "F# is basicall ML.net" is about as useful a language summary as "Objective-C is basically C++.mac". Despite the common heritage, the two feel quite different once you sit down and spend some time with them. And seriously, this "the Common Language Runtime is only available on Windows" trope needs to die. Mono's been around for. . . what, a decade now? Something like that.
  - technomancy 13y ago
    I agree that the underlying runtime and ecosystem affect the "feel" of programming in a given language a lot, but the comment above was specifically referring to the snippet of F# in the blog post, which could be trivially translated into OCaml. AFAIK the main differences around the runtime are that the CLR has true concurrency and access to more libraries without using FFI, while OCaml is able to produce very tiny executables (~200kb) if you use the native compiler.
    - bunderbunder 13y ago
      Sounds like the differences go rather farther than you know: The object model's really quite very different - F# uses CLR objects instead of OCaml-style ones. F# has computation expressions, which are a rather nice riff on monads. F# doesn't have functors. Since it uses CLR objects it does have .NET generics, but it's just not the same Active patterns and type providers are neat, too. Though I believe there are Caml macros that implement both.
      - jnbiche 13y ago
        From my research, it looks like F# does not have structural typing (since it uses the .net type system). Does this mean you can't use constraints on types, like make a type with a range (0.0-1.0) or a type from an enum (man|woman|child)? These kinds of type constraints are one of my favorite things about Haskell, and one of the reasons I'm really interested (in another language category) in Ada -- you can actually model real-life things using the type system.
gecko 13y ago
Mono's actually really solid, and I'm looking to bring it more heavily into use at work. Some of the most active F# contributors are Mono-first, too, so it's a well-supported target.
ivanca 13y ago
What are your main issues with working on Windows 7?
- xradionut 13y ago
  Probably because it's probably Windows. :) I use Windows at my day job and get paid well to develop and admin for it. I also have a few personal applications that require a Windows VM at home. But my personal machines run Linux, which I find is more pleasing for development, exploring, security, tinkering and such. Plus you can tailor your environment to suit your needs (from embedded to supercomputing), not that of a marketing manager.

by jnbiche 13y ago

xmonkee 13y ago

Well F# is basically ML.net so why not check out OCaml? Same language, and no windows required.

ygra 13y ago
F# runs perfectly fine on Mono. No Windows required there, either.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
profquail 13y ago
F# is an ML implementation for .NET; being an ML-based lanaguage, it shares many similarities with OCaml, but as I pointed out yesterday, it is definitely not the same thing as OCaml: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660947
bunderbunder 13y ago
Basically, yes. But in detail, "F# is basicall ML.net" is about as useful a language summary as "Objective-C is basically C++.mac". Despite the common heritage, the two feel quite different once you sit down and spend some time with them. And seriously, this "the Common Language Runtime is only available on Windows" trope needs to die. Mono's been around for. . . what, a decade now? Something like that.
- technomancy 13y ago
  I agree that the underlying runtime and ecosystem affect the "feel" of programming in a given language a lot, but the comment above was specifically referring to the snippet of F# in the blog post, which could be trivially translated into OCaml. AFAIK the main differences around the runtime are that the CLR has true concurrency and access to more libraries without using FFI, while OCaml is able to produce very tiny executables (~200kb) if you use the native compiler.
  - bunderbunder 13y ago
    Sounds like the differences go rather farther than you know: The object model's really quite very different - F# uses CLR objects instead of OCaml-style ones. F# has computation expressions, which are a rather nice riff on monads. F# doesn't have functors. Since it uses CLR objects it does have .NET generics, but it's just not the same Active patterns and type providers are neat, too. Though I believe there are Caml macros that implement both.
    - jnbiche 13y ago
      From my research, it looks like F# does not have structural typing (since it uses the .net type system). Does this mean you can't use constraints on types, like make a type with a range (0.0-1.0) or a type from an enum (man|woman|child)? These kinds of type constraints are one of my favorite things about Haskell, and one of the reasons I'm really interested (in another language category) in Ada -- you can actually model real-life things using the type system.

gecko 13y ago

Mono's actually really solid, and I'm looking to bring it more heavily into use at work. Some of the most active F# contributors are Mono-first, too, so it's a well-supported target.

ivanca 13y ago

What are your main issues with working on Windows 7?

xradionut 13y ago
Probably because it's probably Windows. :) I use Windows at my day job and get paid well to develop and admin for it. I also have a few personal applications that require a Windows VM at home. But my personal machines run Linux, which I find is more pleasing for development, exploring, security, tinkering and such. Plus you can tailor your environment to suit your needs (from embedded to supercomputing), not that of a marketing manager.