I use F# every day, both in my open source and professional work. Love seeing the language continue to improve without going off the rails! I'm looking forward to using the "and!" computations in this release in particular (though I swear they'd already been released).
Edit: oh this post is from November! That's why I thought I'd read about those computations before.
r2ob•1h ago
What kind of problem made you pick up F#? it seems pretty cool
nozzlegear•57m ago
It's been ages since I started using it, but I don't think it was any problem in particular. I think I just happened to watch a video by Scott Wlaschin one day and was intrigued by the weird language and the things he was doing with the type system, having only been familiar with object oriented programming at that point in my life. I kept coming back to it and eventually it became my bread and butter.
What I like most about it is the type system (discriminated unions, etc.). It's really powerful and intuitive, without letting me go overboard "big braining" the perfect type for every situation like I tend to do with e.g. typescript or haskell. F# is also great because we can access the full dotnet runtime and nuget ecosystem. I have several projects where I mix C# and F#, and they're perfectly compatible.
r2ob•41m ago
Nice!
olivia-banks•34m ago
I use OCaml, occasionally, especially for data/transpiler work. I've always wanted to try F#, but it being .NET sort of scares me away. I've always sort of admired the pragmatic beauty of the OCaml ecosystem--at least as much as one can call an ML-derivative 'pragmatic'--though I don't get that same feeling from F#.
Task expressions look neat though, and might give me a reason to try.
sieep•24m ago
.NET is really good nowadays & does well cross platform, absolutely worth trying.
mulmen•22m ago
Is it fully open source so it can survive being abandoned by Microsoft?
sieep•8m ago
From my understanding, .NET, C# F# are all open source. The main thing in the tool chain that isnt is Visual Studio but most people can get by with VS Code
olivia-banks•22m ago
I have to use it (C#) for a required class in college, and I've been pleasantly surprised. I'm always a little suspicious of platforms backed by large companies, but I think at this point that's sorta an unavoidable reality.
sieep•6m ago
Luckily .NET, the compiler, and such are open source now so Microsoft really just handles the big picture stuff. Its got great performance and the new .NET 10 might be my favorite backend runtime ever created.
ibejoeb•12m ago
It's a very practical ML-family language. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It doesn't really sacrifice anything, either. The last thing I delivered with it was a network health utility, which did UDP and TCP sockets and platform API calls very cleanly. It's really not a toy language. Distribution is cool too, because you can build for a system with the runtime installed or build a single-file executable. My suggestion: build a utility program with it for your own purposes and if you're productive with it.
nozzlegear•1h ago
Edit: oh this post is from November! That's why I thought I'd read about those computations before.
r2ob•1h ago
nozzlegear•57m ago
What I like most about it is the type system (discriminated unions, etc.). It's really powerful and intuitive, without letting me go overboard "big braining" the perfect type for every situation like I tend to do with e.g. typescript or haskell. F# is also great because we can access the full dotnet runtime and nuget ecosystem. I have several projects where I mix C# and F#, and they're perfectly compatible.
r2ob•41m ago