Comment by daxfohl
8 years ago
That's been my experience at Microsoft. I'd love to start a new project there in F#. And I think the kids there would eventually grasp it and create better code. They're certainly smart enough. But it would take a while to unlearn OOP. My first year or two of F# code was complete crap. So given average tenure of a fresh grad bigcorp employee is a couple of years, it would not be worth it. I think this is a good decision though an unfortunate reality by Rob Pike.
A solution might be to change the hiring process to test FP concepts instead of OO, or to use a lisp- so users do not need to learn a complex type system in addition to FP.
If they are using C# (I'm making that assumption - I could be mistaken), the type system in F# isn't a huge leap in terms of learnability. It wasn't that way in my experience, anyways.
The learning curve seems to be with other aspects - like where the hell do I put my I/O? Error handling? How do I trace (or write) all these functions that are piped or composed together? Questions like those are what I tend to see. Both personally and when pointing other people to F#.
As an ML, F# isn’t a pure FP, so I/O and error handling shouldn’t be that hard.
But ya, functional oragami will make debugging harder even in C#.