3 ms·

I've often seen OCaml compared to F#; as someone who knows Haskell and Rust (among others), which is better to learn? I'm not really a Windows guy, which makes

I've often seen OCaml compared to F#; as someone who knows Haskell and Rust (among others), which is better to learn? I'm not really a Windows guy, which makes me think OCaml, but I've seen that Xamarin now works with F#, which is appealing to my inner app developer.

chadzawistowski 12y ago
F# is essentially OCaml.NET, so knowledge of either will be very transferable to the other. F# can interface with C# types, but it feels cumbersome at times. Idiomatic F# is very similar to idiomatic OCaml.
bsamuels 12y ago
I prefer F#, but only so because it has decent visual studio tooling and .net interop. F# power tools' refactoring is great, and its syntax coloring is very good as well. http://puu.sh/a1vM5/c735f3d319.png http://puu.sh/a1vM5/c735f3d319.png (i swear this looks a lot nicer on the washed out screen i program with) The interop with .net libs is helpful too - but i've found that if there's anything that's really hurting F#, it's all the OOP tacked onto it to make the .net interop work. Decent tradeoff if you ask me, but it's cringeworthy to see people using F# like an oop language when the oop only appears to be there for the interop magic to work.
stonemetal 12y ago
Comparing OCaml and F# is about like comparing Java and C#. The MS languages started out very similar to the others, but made much larger strides. F# has changed their syntax to be lighter, with something similar to Haskell's offside rule. They added workflows which are monads but not quite as nice as Haskell's.
adultSwim 12y ago
My personal preference is OCaml. One big point I would give to F# is tooling. Having a real IDE for OCaml would be nice. When I was writing OCaml I used Emacs with ocamlspotter. The other big F# feature is library support. OCaml has pretty good libraries but F# can leverage the whole .NET framework. This would be noticeable in areas like GUIs. I imagine that not using Microsoft F# would negate the benefits of F# over OCaml. To be honest, go with either. For most people the benefits come from the simple/common/old features. Once you get used to dealing with the compiler, you'll likely fall in love with ML.

chadzawistowski 12y ago

F# is essentially OCaml.NET, so knowledge of either will be very transferable to the other. F# can interface with C# types, but it feels cumbersome at times. Idiomatic F# is very similar to idiomatic OCaml.

bsamuels 12y ago

I prefer F#, but only so because it has decent visual studio tooling and .net interop. F# power tools' refactoring is great, and its syntax coloring is very good as well. http://puu.sh/a1vM5/c735f3d319.png http://puu.sh/a1vM5/c735f3d319.png (i swear this looks a lot nicer on the washed out screen i program with) The interop with .net libs is helpful too - but i've found that if there's anything that's really hurting F#, it's all the OOP tacked onto it to make the .net interop work. Decent tradeoff if you ask me, but it's cringeworthy to see people using F# like an oop language when the oop only appears to be there for the interop magic to work.

stonemetal 12y ago

Comparing OCaml and F# is about like comparing Java and C#. The MS languages started out very similar to the others, but made much larger strides. F# has changed their syntax to be lighter, with something similar to Haskell's offside rule. They added workflows which are monads but not quite as nice as Haskell's.

adultSwim 12y ago

My personal preference is OCaml. One big point I would give to F# is tooling. Having a real IDE for OCaml would be nice. When I was writing OCaml I used Emacs with ocamlspotter. The other big F# feature is library support. OCaml has pretty good libraries but F# can leverage the whole .NET framework. This would be noticeable in areas like GUIs. I imagine that not using Microsoft F# would negate the benefits of F# over OCaml. To be honest, go with either. For most people the benefits come from the simple/common/old features. Once you get used to dealing with the compiler, you'll likely fall in love with ML.