Comment by neonsunset 2 days ago
It is best to just use task CE full-time unless you need specific behavior of async CEs.
The author of the original comment, however, does not know this nor tried verifying whether F# actually works seamlessly with this nowadays (it does).
Writing asynchronous code in F# involves less syntax noise than in C#. None of that boilerplate is required, F# should not be written that way at all.
This is perfectly fine, but I think it's better to be unsure about specific language feature than confidently state something that is not correct (anymore).
Personally, I'm just annoyed by never-ending cycle of ".NET is bad because {reason x}", "When was this the case?", "10 years ago", "So?".
Like in the example above, chances are you just won't see new F# code do this.
It will just use task { ... } normally.
I understand that you CAN do this, I'm saying that it makes your code look like shit and takes away some of the elegance of ML
Please stop insisting on this. Task CE exists since F# 6.0 and handles awaiting the CoreLib Tasks and ValueTasks without any ceremony.
I'm saying that I wish computation blocks looked better in F#. Instead of:
let foo id = async {
let! bar = getBar id
return bar
}
let async foo id =
let! bar = getBar id
bar
let async foo id =
getBar! id
async Task<string> foo(int id) => await getBar(id);
member this.Foo = ...
member val Foo = ...Your criticism is rather incoherent and it is difficult for me to make sense of it.
You don't even have to use the computation block for that and can use the built in functions as I mentioned earlier and gave 3 examples of.
You're both complaining about extra keywords while trying to make the case of adding yet another one. Thus your complaint boils down to F# not picking the exact keywords that you like - that the language is not specialized to exactly how you want to use it. In language design there are always tradeoffs but I'm unable to see how your suggestions would improve the language in the general case or even in your specific case.
Computation expressions are a generalized concept which are there to add the exact kind of syntactic sugar that you're after. It's better than C# in that you can create your own as a first class concept in addition to using the built in ones. It's there for the exact purpose of creating mini-embedded DSLs, the very thing you're complaining about is the exact point of it.
F# is not for everyone, nor should it be.
F# is a big language so I think it is to be expected that beginners will not know these things. I don't think the fix is to simplify F# we should just understand that F# is not for everyone and that is ok.