Reflecting on F# in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Reflecting on F# in 2017

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44 pointsdustinmoris11 comments

On a related note, I'm a long, long time HN'er and huge F# fan. A few weeks ago I received an invitation from Uncle Bob to visit him and do a case study using F#.

It wasn't a training video, much more of a fun coder-to-coder week where Bob and I went through a few sample problems. I tried to show him how thinking in F# is different from the C#/Java most of his viewers are familiar with. I also tried to share some of my excitement with where the language is and how cool it is to have fun coding again.

You can see more about this on the F# reddit group. There's a post where I asked the community what to go over [1], and a post detailing how things went [2].

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/7i7ssp/tips_for_int...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/7k3chx/update_on_th...

I like the topics Phillip lists at the end he especially wants to focus on in terms of delivery from Microsoft. Achieving all of these as well as a 4.2 version of the language would be a great win for the F# community.

How is F# development on the Mac? Visual Studio Code with Ionide is mentioned: http://ionide.io

How does this compare with native Visual Studio on a PC? My impression that you’d be a lot more productive in Visual Studio: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-...

For F# development I would choose VS Code with Ionide over VS for PC (haven't tried the Mac version yet) any time.

Does ionide for vscode still requires installing mono in addition to .net core ?

Running on pure NET Core has been available for about a month as an experimental toggle ("Fsharp.Fsacruntime" : "netcore"). I mostly use VS so I don't know if it's become stable yet.

Rider IDE from Jetbrains supports both C#/F# and when they initially launched the .net core + F# had some gaps, but they should have fixed it by now.

I‘m a .NET developer since 2004 but don’t use Windows and VS anymore since five years or so.

I‘m using F# for some parts of a larger mobile app with Xamarin, and therefore have all three IDEs in use: VS for Mac, Rider, VS Code with Ionide. The ladder feels most lightweight for F# only. In a mixed solution with C# Rider probably provides the best experience at the moment. VS for Mac is not very usable, to put it friendly.

However, tooling is evolving but compared to other platforms not very mature yet. Refactoring for example feels like what most editors support for JavaScript.

But it’s not a show-stopper (for me).

I've always been interested about F#. How are the effects done in the language? If using monads, does it have something similar to Haskell's do notation or Scala's for notation? What are the good resources to read how to start F# development on Linux?

F# has syntactic support for monads called computation expressions (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe...). There are a couple of these included in the standard library (seq and async). However the language is impure so you are free to put side-effects anywhere you want without encoding it in your types.

I can't wait to get type providers on net core! Great to hear it's a priority.

For those of you who don't know F# type providers, check them out, they really are amazing. Providing type inference from HTML web sites, json payloads, SQL Databases amongst others.

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