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Comment by gwbas1c

3 days ago

> Why F#?

I'm kinda wondering if anyone here with decent C#/.net experience can give their version of the answer?

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The article really didn't answer its own question. It basically says "How" instead of "Why"...

...Which as someone who's spent over 20 years in C#, and tends to advocate for "functional" style, leaves me with more questions than answers!

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gwbas1c

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kowalgta  3 days ago

I've worked with .net professionally for almost 20 years. At the beginning with C# while last decade almost exclusively with F#.

F# is just a better language. Simpler, more concise, more readable with stronger type safety. I will never go back to writing C# as I'm finding it too frustrating at times and unproductive.

Foofoobar12345  2 days ago

Everything is an expression (i.e. its an actual functional programming language), and along with it comes a different way of thinking about problems. Coupled with a really good type system which has discriminated unions, you'll have much fewer bugs.

Pro tip: don't write F# like you would write C# - then you might as well write C#. Take the time to learn the functional primitives.

  • arwhatever  2 days ago

    if I may elaborate on "everything is an expression," F# allows you to do things like (with apologies for being a tad rusty with the syntax)

      let bar = 
      if foo then  
         7  
      else  
         11

    or

      let bar = 
      try
        // code that might throw
        7
      with ex ->
        11

    and will ensure that both/all code branches return a compatible type for the `let` binding.

    Whereas in C# you have to do like

      int bar;

  if (foo) {
     bar = 7;
  } else {
     bar = 11;
  }

    And C# will let you know if you omit the `else` on accident ...

    Except that most C# developers do

      int bar = 0; // or some other default value`

    to get the red squiggly to go away while they type the rest of the code, unknowingly subverting the compiler's safety check.

    This doesn't seem like a big deal given these examples. But it becomes a much bigger deal when the if/else grows super large, becomes nested, etc.