Unless you have a setup where you can easily run one system with a debugger attached while connecting it to everything else, you’re basically restricted to running a debugger for bugs that can be reproduced locally.
Now maybe if I was better that wouldn't be the case, but even the cleanest "wish i thought of that" functional code i've seen still looks like it'd be easier to fail fast using a debugger with.
In fairness though, I will admit I use the debugger a lot less when i'm not screwing with reflection on generic types or whatever because runtime errors just happen a lot less in functional styles. Usually if it compiles, it runs, because the compiler can sanity check the code better than you can.
> [uses F#]
That has to be humblebragging. The average .net developer is terrified of or doesn't even know about F#.
The only reason F# winds up feeling harder isn't so much how F# works, but simply because the entire dotnet environment was built for C# first, so you do need to know how to handle the C# style. I do think that if you could just pick one and then suddenly have every library support it's styles, F# would probably be easier overall because it's just got a lot of nice features built in that make updating your code so much easier.
C# is not a simple language, but F# has basically all the complexity of C# with OCaml on top.
`f(a, b)` looks like a call to a function that takes a single tuple as its argument. So I would expect `f` to have the type signature `A * B -> C` instead of `A -> B -> C`. Is my intuition wrong? If it is, then what does F# use the parenthetical syntax for?
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
F# enforcing a lot of good practice code style stuff (order matters for example pisses off long time devs who already have styles, but prevents SOOOO much stupid bs from beginners) and basically eliminates runtime/chasing variable state errors completely so long as you can stay within style. Yes it'd be nicer if there was only one way to invoke functions but if i had to take a tradeoff I think it's a pretty easy one.
It is an issue that yes, like your example, you're often stuck ALSO learning OO because "oh you want to use X library, well that's OO so...", and even then you can isolate your mutable/OO areas really well, but this is more of an issue with it being an second fiddle language. If F# got F# specific libraries for all the C# stuff out there tomorrow I think it'd take off and most people would never look back.
If we're talking basic business logic/beginner programmer stuff, yeah I think F# offers a lot of stuff that makes it flat out easier to use. And if you want to point out complex issues, I feel the biggest one is that something that's intuitively much easier to understand in OO (create a variable/object, populate it on each iteration of a loop depending on logic), can feel daunting as hell in F# (fold).
You're noticing a very real relationship.
It's easy for people with functional programming knowledge, or who had OCaml as their first programming experience like I did at university, but for people without those exposures I can understand the difficulty.
Oh? Did you win some award? I'm curious as to how you're determining this?
One major issue I do see coming from the C# side is "well how do I do this then?!", which often the answer is "you don't, because you don't need to" or "well what if it's more performant to do it mutably!" well then thankfully F# can absolutely do that.
If you keep an open mind it's really a very clean and simple language, but in an age where half of development is importing 8 well known libraries, not being the main supported language is a major weakness.
However, I wrote my first thing a port of a small C# tool of a couple hundred lines, to F# in about an hour. It's been about a week now, and things are considerably smoothing out.
To be considered niche, the F# tooling has been great. Also, having the .NET libraries available adds a lot of built-in capability.
F# isn't hard, it's just different. Hell in many ways i'd argue it's much much easier once you get used to it. It doesn't have the support C# does so often you're stuck with a library that WILL work but doesn't have documentation for doing it in F#, and that can lead to struggles, but that's not really a sign of being a good coder.
Most dotnet developers could probably code circles around me in F# if they knew it existed/gave it a chance.
Personally I stuck with it because it had the low code look of python with strong typing. It took a bit to wrap my head around some functional stuff (basically map/iter = foreach and if you want to update something on each loop you probably want a fold, or more likely a built in function), but once I got over that hurdle it was pretty smooth sailing.
The irony is that by far the hardest part is the library thing, which your average dotnet dev would handle WAAAAY better than me.