> Why F#?
I'm kinda wondering if anyone here with decent C#/.net experience can give their version of the answer?
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The article really didn't answer its own question. It basically says "How" instead of "Why"...
...Which as someone who's spent over 20 years in C#, and tends to advocate for "functional" style, leaves me with more questions than answers!
Everything is an expression (i.e. its an actual functional programming language), and along with it comes a different way of thinking about problems. Coupled with a really good type system which has discriminated unions, you'll have much fewer bugs.
Pro tip: don't write F# like you would write C# - then you might as well write C#. Take the time to learn the functional primitives.
if I may elaborate on "everything is an expression," F# allows you to do things like (with apologies for being a tad rusty with the syntax)
let bar =
if foo then
7
else
11
let bar =
try
// code that might throw
7
with ex ->
11
Whereas in C# you have to do like
int bar;
if (foo) {
bar = 7;
} else {
bar = 11;
}
Except that most C# developers do
int bar = 0; // or some other default value`
This doesn't seem like a big deal given these examples. But it becomes a much bigger deal when the if/else grows super large, becomes nested, etc.
Ah yes that is definitely a nice addition to the C# language, albeit still with a couple of shortcomings compared to F#:
1. It doesn’t support code blocks, so if you need multiple lines or statements you have to define a function elsewhere. 2. To get exhaustiveness checking on int-backed enums you have to fiddle with compiler preprocessor directives.
And for #2 any data associated with each enum variant is left implied by C# and has to be inferred from a reading of the surrounding imperative code, whereas in F# the union data structure makes the relationship explicit, and verifiable by the compiler.
A nicer, cleaner and simpler syntax, superior pattern matching, active patterns, discriminated unions and computation expressions
I've worked with .net professionally for almost 20 years. At the beginning with C# while last decade almost exclusively with F#.
F# is just a better language. Simpler, more concise, more readable with stronger type safety. I will never go back to writing C# as I'm finding it too frustrating at times and unproductive.