Why f# and why not?

[wallymathieu]

Pros

• brevity and readability (productivity)
  • ctor dependencies
  • record declaration
  • more inference
• sensible defaults for mutability, access level
• discriminated unions : sensible declaration of simple enumeration types and union types (compared to the options for c#)
• focus on composition over inheritance
• shared runtime with other .net languages
• nice OO style language
• nice story around integrations with type providers
• possible to be more explicit and less explicit than what's seen in c#
• no implicit type conversions
• very mature

Cons

• most c# developers want to ignore anything else than c# : the one ring, fear of the other
• current msbuild/nuget developments have left big community driven projects such as paket, FAKE have taken flack due to msbuild/nuget breaking changes
• low market penetration (looks like it's around same numbers as Haskell in some markets)

The point around c# developers is not uniform, there is a percentage that don't mind f# but due to low demand choose bigger market. F# seems to be a seedbed for things that sometimes end up as c# libs/tools.

My own preference:

• c# is good for low level implementations
• c# is good enough for services with less need to deal with complex domain (simple ~= CRUD + simple domain logic)
• F# shines when you have something novel that might be kind of complicated to implement.
• f# can be quite productive: spike or POC work when there is no demand on continued operation by commonly available worker

[wallymathieu]

https://twitter.com/jen20/status/1184038941076459520?s=20

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256858 :

I've heard this before, and frankly, it is not something I recognise. A few years back, I was the VP of Engineering at a (now well-known) startup that had chosen to use .NET (on Azure, which is a whole other story). Everything was written in F# by default, occasionally branching out to C# or C++ if it was proven that F# was unsuitable for the job.

We managed to hire a very large team in comparatively little time - and because people who apply for F# jobs either know it (indicating someone interested in looking forwards in the industry), or were interested in learning it (we provided training), quality was better and waste was substantially less overall than I have seen elsewhere in a rapidly scaling team.

Despite what Microsoft may think, F# is the crown jewel of the .NET world, and it is a mistake to sideline it over fears such as this.

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

[wallymathieu]

Git has seen a huge upsurge in the latest years. I would not have predicted this rise. What are the killer features of git?

[wallymathieu]

Seems the rise of GitHub caused git as a format to rise to the top

[wallymathieu]

Big question is: why are people not using COBOL more? It had a huge market share until < 1990~2000. Answer seems to be that COBOL was tied to vendor lock in for specific hardware systems.

[wallymathieu]

https://mobile.twitter.com/EBrown8534/status/1189615987949215746

[wallymathieu]

https://killalldefects.com/2019/12/15/a-net-managers-perspective-on-f/amp/?__twitter_impression=true