The Problem with F# Evangelism

Re:The Problem with F# Evangelism by runT1ME on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @02:17PM (#15029809)

My previous job was working for a .NET shop that powered tons of automotive search engines etc. across the web. We moved to more and more functional concepts using C# as the team learned about them and had a lot of success with them. At a certain point, we explored using F#, but the lack of type classes & HKTs meant we kept having to repeat ourselves.

We ended up choosing Scala for some new projects despite having an inferior IDE experience and being unable to use some of our other libraries. I don't think I can emphasize how much not having type classes and HKTs hurts productivity once you buy into the fully functional mindset. We were extremely productive in Scala because the language was a bit more powerful.

I would love to use F# again, but not until the language adds those features.

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Re:The Problem with F# Evangelism by corn_dog on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @04:11PM (#15030891)

Is there anything about using F# that you would see as a plus over Scala or Haskell?

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Re:The Problem with F# Evangelism by runT1ME on Friday August 18, 2017 @08:37PM (#15050845)

Oh yeah,

1. IDE experience is much better.

2. I like the fact that F# emphasizes the functional aspects, it's a bit of a 'tighter' language than Scala (despite the two crucial missing pieces) and so I think people could learn it a bit faster. Scala has things like structural typing, all kinds of optional syntax, multiple inheritance, etc.

3. Lack of flexibility in syntax is a plus imo for F#. Some of Scala's flexibility is nice, but some of it just confuses the newbies (like the various usages of `_`).

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