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Please don't put F# on a shiny golden pedestal. A good C# developer can use it without any problem as well. You of course would need to be open-minded enough to

Please don't put F# on a shiny golden pedestal. A good C# developer can use it without any problem as well. You of course would need to be open-minded enough to understand that a C# developer doesn't mean an imperative developer. I am not the best developer at all, but my C# code tends to be quite functional and I prefer using the Maybe monad to deal with nulls in some cases for example. I just don't see any massive obvious benefit of loosing the tooling and ReSharper to switch to F#. Especially now that C# is open-source and the Roslyn is nearly there. PS: a good JavaScript developer will probably be even more productive than both C# and F#, despite the language being horrible.

profquail 12y ago
Well, by switching to F# you get much better type inference, discriminated union types, pattern-matching, explicit tail-recursion, serializable types by default, and type providers (and that's not even a comprehensive list). I suppose it depends what type of app you're building as to whether those are worth anything to you -- but in the areas where F# is rapidly getting more popular (data science, numerical/algorithm-heavy work, distributed computing) they do in fact make you much more productive. A good chunk of that productivity gain results from being able to easily and quickly write type-safe code and express algorithms without a great deal of syntactic overhead. A JavaScript developer might be more productive than either a C# or F# developer depending on what kind of app he/she was writing; overall I don't think that would be the case, especially once you factor in maintenance costs of the code over the long-term.
- deleted 12y ago
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knocte 12y ago
> A good C# developer can use it without any problem as well. This is not true (I've been a C# dev for many years already, and I've been learning F# for the last months). It's not so easy to switch the mindset and the syntax. > PS: a good JavaScript developer will probably be even more productive than both C# and F#, despite the language being horrible. Yeah, more productive the first days (at a PoC phase), but more productive the next months? I don't think so. You need to watch this talk: http://vimeo.com/72870631 http://vimeo.com/72870631
- Locke1689 12y ago
  The video is not a good argument. All the time I saved writing Haskell by being able to use quick check was completely torched by having to refactor my entire codebase, with no tooling, when I realized I needed to thread some configuration state all the way down to a tiny area of my code as well as spending a good 4 or 5 days hunting down space leaks. Overall, I think I would have been more productive with OCaml. Every language has trade-offs, you just have to understand what they are and how they affect the problem you're working on.
  - knocte 12y ago
    The talk isn't about Haskell. Haskell is used just as an example for most code snippets. But all arguments raised in the talk apply perfectly well to F#, and F# has much better tooling than Haskell.

profquail 12y ago

Well, by switching to F# you get much better type inference, discriminated union types, pattern-matching, explicit tail-recursion, serializable types by default, and type providers (and that's not even a comprehensive list). I suppose it depends what type of app you're building as to whether those are worth anything to you -- but in the areas where F# is rapidly getting more popular (data science, numerical/algorithm-heavy work, distributed computing) they do in fact make you much more productive. A good chunk of that productivity gain results from being able to easily and quickly write type-safe code and express algorithms without a great deal of syntactic overhead. A JavaScript developer might be more productive than either a C# or F# developer depending on what kind of app he/she was writing; overall I don't think that would be the case, especially once you factor in maintenance costs of the code over the long-term.

deleted 12y ago
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knocte 12y ago

> A good C# developer can use it without any problem as well. This is not true (I've been a C# dev for many years already, and I've been learning F# for the last months). It's not so easy to switch the mindset and the syntax. > PS: a good JavaScript developer will probably be even more productive than both C# and F#, despite the language being horrible. Yeah, more productive the first days (at a PoC phase), but more productive the next months? I don't think so. You need to watch this talk: http://vimeo.com/72870631 http://vimeo.com/72870631

Locke1689 12y ago
The video is not a good argument. All the time I saved writing Haskell by being able to use quick check was completely torched by having to refactor my entire codebase, with no tooling, when I realized I needed to thread some configuration state all the way down to a tiny area of my code as well as spending a good 4 or 5 days hunting down space leaks. Overall, I think I would have been more productive with OCaml. Every language has trade-offs, you just have to understand what they are and how they affect the problem you're working on.
- knocte 12y ago
  The talk isn't about Haskell. Haskell is used just as an example for most code snippets. But all arguments raised in the talk apply perfectly well to F#, and F# has much better tooling than Haskell.