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A subset of F# can be used (more or less) as a terser C#. Functional languages make writing correct programs easier. I don't think modifiability of an existing

by fsloth 12y ago

A subset of F# can be used (more or less) as a terser C#. Functional languages make writing correct programs easier. I don't think modifiability of an existing program depends on the language as much from the quality of the code. F# is not difficult, just a bit different. Functional languages seem to have this odd halo around them that for some reason they are thought to be obscure and non practical. It's probably due to a historical baggage. If Ruby was originally picked up by compiler experts and language afficionados and the only resources that one could find were references to topics in those domains I bet people would be saying the same thing about it. The main problem for adoption IMO is not language complexity, but rather lack of educational resources that display how easy and nice it's to do simple things on the language. But since the simple things are so nice and easy it's really straightforward to do something a bit more complex and most of the published examples focus on these more advanced things.

hga 12y ago
I would suspect that learning functional programming itself, after pretty much everyone gets started with imperative, could take as much effort as learning OO from the same imperative base (but of course a lot more people now start with something like Python and at least dabble with OO). I.e. more than an afternoon or probably a month to get good, vs. the few days it takes to learn another language with familiar paradigms. Not sure from personal experience because I learned functional style Lisp/Scheme really early, more than a decade before OO, which made learning Clojure a relative snap. OO in the form of C++ was harder for me, but maybe functional is just easier for my mind to wrap around. The quality of the Lisp and Scheme texts I used, especially SICP, also probably made a difference (the OO texts I used were good, but not as great, with the exception of OOSE (http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Engineering-Approach/dp/0201544350/ http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Engineering-A...), but that's as much about great design of your project as well as what the project is making).

by fsloth 12y ago

hga 12y ago

I would suspect that learning functional programming itself, after pretty much everyone gets started with imperative, could take as much effort as learning OO from the same imperative base (but of course a lot more people now start with something like Python and at least dabble with OO). I.e. more than an afternoon or probably a month to get good, vs. the few days it takes to learn another language with familiar paradigms. Not sure from personal experience because I learned functional style Lisp/Scheme really early, more than a decade before OO, which made learning Clojure a relative snap. OO in the form of C++ was harder for me, but maybe functional is just easier for my mind to wrap around. The quality of the Lisp and Scheme texts I used, especially SICP, also probably made a difference (the OO texts I used were good, but not as great, with the exception of OOSE (http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Engineering-Approach/dp/0201544350/ http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Engineering-A...), but that's as much about great design of your project as well as what the project is making).