Announcing a pre-release of F# 3.1 and the Visual F# tools in Visual Studio 2013

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2013/06/27/announcing-a-pre-release-of-f-3-1-and-the-visual-f-tools-in-visual-studio-2013.aspx

by Associat0r • 13 years ago

23 18 13 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

inzax• 13 years ago

Can anyone answer me why specifically should I use F#?

Jaecen• 13 years ago

The biggest draw would be if you wanted to work in a functional language on the .NET platform.

7manr82h5• 13 years ago

the biggest draw? i hated .net (just at a glance), reason i chose F# is because its multiparadigm, i get my OOP, Imperative (for speed) and started to learning functional too, which helps with the other paradigms

mattchamb• 13 years ago

Because it is an awesome language.

also, http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/why-use-fsharp/

virtualwhys4• 13 years ago

Most accessible functional programming blog. Love his monad tutorial: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/why-i-wont-be-writing...

virtualwhys4• 13 years ago

F# Type Providers should be illegal.

If there is an equivalent in any other language than F#, do tell.

tikhonj3• 13 years ago

Gosu[1]has a very similar feature--I think it might have even had it for longer than F#! Too bad almost nobody uses it: it's a nice language that makes a perfect complement or replacement for Java.

[1] http://gosu-lang.org/

Gosu was actually the first language I ever used at a real job (well, an internship), which is not a common distinction :P. That also means that my current OCaml internship actually uses a more common language! I bet none of the other interns here can claim having professionally used a language markedly less popular than OCaml.

kvb• 13 years ago

Not that it's a popular language, but a type-provider-like feature was recently added to the dependently-typed language Idris (see https://github.com/edwinb/Idris-dev/commit/46964d7d57c18826d...).

tikhonj3• 13 years ago

There's really two separate sets of reasons: one set for using .NET and one for doing functional programming.

.NET is a good technology if you don't mind being somewhat tied to the Mircrosoft stack: it's well designed, reasonably performant, strongly supported and relatively stable. It has good integration with other Microsoft products, good tooling with Visual Studio and an extensive set of libraries. (The libraries are what would probably tie you the most strongly to Microsoft.)

Functional programming is a much deeper topic, so I'll give my condensed and unabashedly biased summary: functional languages tend to be more expressive (and, transitively, more productive) while producing code that's easier to support--F# has a good type system, and functional programming leads to much lower coupling than OO much less procedural programming. This happens without sacrificing performance too much. Sure, you won't get C speed (or even C# speed), but it's more than good enough for most tasks. I'm pretty sure F# is at most a couple of times slower than C#--much faster than the popular dynamically typed languages! I'm really only familiar with OCaml and Haskell, both similar languages, and they can certainly produce fast code.

So if you're convinced by functional programming and somehow tied to .NET, F# is the perfect choice. If you're not tied to .NET, I would recommend Haskell or maybe OCaml instead.

7manr82h5• 13 years ago

i would like to point out that i am using F# with emacs on linux with mono, i made this transition recently from windows and i have no complaints yet.

Associat0r• 13 years ago

F# is general purpose and multi-paradigm, it even has OO classes and imperative for and while loops and I get the same perf as C# and even more in some cases. I for one got into .NET because of F# and to me .NET is just like any other language runtime.

It's not just tied to MS, it runs on every major platform thanks to Mono see the left bar on this site http://fsharp.org/

rauljara• 13 years ago

You in particular? No, I cannot answer that question. I don't believe there is a single language which all programmers should be using.

In general? It is a strongly typed functional language with excellent type inference that isn't lazy and support imperative programming. I think (and this is opinion) that it much easier to reason about an program written idiomatically in a dialect of ML (such as F#) than one written in idiomatic Haskell, basically just due to the lack of laziness. I also think I prefer Haskell to the ML variants, but I also found the hump which one has to get over in order to be productive significantly lower.

7manr82h5• 13 years ago

note: there is optional laziness via seq or 'lazy'

Announcing a pre-release of F# 3.1 and the Visual F# tools in Visual Studio 2013

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