F# 10

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-fsharp-10/

by tosh • 6 months ago

128 36 6 months ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

nozzlegear2• 5 months ago

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.

r2ob3• 5 months ago

What kind of problem made you pick up F#? it seems pretty cool

nozzlegear2• 5 months 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.

vips7L• 5 months ago

Not who you asked, but I decided to try F# after reading “Domain Modeling Made Functional” which uses F# and is one of the best books I’ve read on domain driven design. I cannot recommend it more.

That being said, F# wasn’t really for me and applying the ideas from the book into other languages has been a better fit for me.

olivia-banks5• 5 months 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.

sieep6• 5 months ago

.NET is really good nowadays & does well cross platform, absolutely worth trying.

mulmen2• 5 months ago

Is it fully open source so it can survive being abandoned by Microsoft?

olivia-banks5• 5 months 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.

ibejoeb3• 5 months 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.

olivia-banks5• 5 months ago

Interesting! We're building a bindings generator for a C++ library, and the current prototype is written in OCaml. I might shift it over to F# and see what's up.

tombert• 5 months ago

As somewhat of a functional programming nerd, and a perpetual user of Linux and Unix, I think F# is really very cool.

I am one of the happy few who has had paying work with F# when I worked at Jet and Walmart. I came in with primarily a Haskell background, and so I was expecting to hate it because I hate most things that Microsoft has attached its name to, but I ended up really liking it.

Just a note, while its syntax is similar to OCaml, its semantics are a bit different. You don't have the cool OCaml functors in the same way, but you do have Haskell-style "do" notation with monads, which is nice.

I haven't used OCaml in awhile so I can't go into a lot of detail on the differences between them, but the only things I really missed from Haskell are monad transformers and software transactional memory.

I definitely think it's worth playing with for an afternoon.

olivia-banks5• 5 months ago

From when I (tried to) learn Haskell, I thought `do` was cool, so that's interesting to hear. I'll give it a shot!

bairymr• 5 months ago

I wish SML had a community like F#

emmanueloga_2• 5 months ago

I got into OCaml for a while, which naturally led me to try F#. What pushed me away back then was that the tooling lagged behind C#, especially in VS Code, and the C#/F# interop wasn’t as ergonomic as I expected. I liked the idea of using F# for the core and C# around the edges, but it didn’t feel smooth in practice. This was years ago, so maybe the tooling has improved since.

I’ve always wondered whether tighter integration with C# would have led to broader adoption, though that might have changed the character of the language.

dlahoda3• 5 months ago

when you tried? i have heard it improved over time

emmanueloga_2• 5 months ago

good point, could be some 10 years ago now, I think...

F# 10

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