Rebuild from scratch but also recreate all the existing functionality in a much better standard library and finally the chain can be broken. But nobody wants to do that.
There are some challenges coming up with design changes to the compiler and C# that might overlap what F# already has but it'll get sorted out.
Great resources for getting started with F# at https://fsharp.org/
My personal preference is generally to install the SDK and use the http://ionide.io/ with VScode as it seems to work most reliably cross platform.
I have .NET Core but the whole thing seems to require Mono and it isn't clear from fsharp.org that you can do without.
MVC5 was never released though, and the changes have been rather minimal from ASP.NET Core v1 to v2 with straightforward migration guides, so it might look messier than it actually is if you were working through all the previews and release candidates instead.
Nevertheless, Microsoft has a long history of having messy v1.0 with most of the stability coming after v2.0, so you can consider the foundation pretty stable now that it's on v2.1 and more.
TypeScript and JS underneath is actually quite malleable - you can escape static typing at any point and revert to simple JS object model when things don't map cleanly in the type system - and then still have types at the boundaries - makes meta-programming trivial in some cases - where it would look like a monstrosity in C#.
F# is interesting and has a lot of advantages over C#, but few people seem to be willing to invest the time to pick it up in the .NET community.
So I don't really view .NET core as a superior alternative, I've worked in JVM land, they are more mature and while Java sucks there are other languages on top of it as well and are decent to use (Kotlin ~ C#, Scala ~ F#)
o_0. Think you need to check yourself mate.
I believe the productiveness of more "expressive" language tends to be undermined by the loss of productivity that occurs when you're compelled to write blog posts or comment on hacker news about how amazingly productive and expressive your language is.
If I need to waste that time sifting trough boilerplate than I'm pretty upset because I get less shit done in that time window.
Chatting on forums is a casual brain teaser and keeping up to date on industry stuff.
> [I find that] using a language with limited expressiveness (C#) is not very productive for me.
Like, I'd figure you can be mad productive in any language (even COBOL?) although I'm only completely cosy in a couple. There's no need to be so dismissive of the tools that others use.
Why is C# not expressive? It has the DLR and `dynamic` keyword which behaves just like JS typing if that's what you want, because it seems like your issue is really with static typing in general. Functional languages are nice but it seems C# with functional its slowly and carefully integrated functional extensions is actually more productive for most developers.
Think about AutoMapper and then compare it to a TS solution using spread operator. How much boilerplate automapper crap do you see in your typical enterprise C# project ?
And that's not even touching on functional features, like you can't even have top level functions in C#, it's "one class per file dogma" + multiple wasted boilperplate lines and scrolling. I recently rewrote a C# program to F# - didn't even modify much in terms of semantics (OK having discriminated unions and pattern matching was a huge win in one case), just by using higher level operators and grouping stuff - line count went down to 1/3 and was grouped in to logical modules. I could read one module as a unit and understand it in it's context instead of having to browse 20 definition files with random 5 line type definitions. I could achieve similar improvements by rewriting to TS or Python.
C# adds overhead all over the place, people are just so used to it they don't even see it as useless overhead but as inherent problems they need solve - like how many of the popular enterprise patterns are workarounds around language limitations ?
When I bring this up people just assume I'm lazy about writing code - but I don't really care about writing the code out - tools mostly generate the boilerplate anyway. Having to read trough that noise is such productivity drain because instead of focusing on the issue at hand I'm focusing on filtering out the bloat from the codebase.
I could rewrite your entire comment in reverse about how I find C# highly expressive and readable while dynamic languages or Kotlin (blech) are a mess of inconsistent whack-a-doodle experimentation.
But my opinion is useless.
The value in any platform is productivity and if any given team can be productive, it doesn't matter if it's COBOL, RPG-3, Pascal, BASIC, or a functional language like F# or plain old JavaScript.
It's more that C# is static typing done poorly IMO - a relatively limited type system that adds overhead compared to dynamic languages or more expressive static languages.
I agree it makes JS better. I agree it's a good tool for its purpose.
But "fascinating" ?
It's hardly the most elegant scripting language down there (Ruby, Python, Kotlin and Dart doesn't have to live with the JS legacy cruft).
It has a very small ecosystem outside of the web.
The syntax is quite verbose for scripting.
It has very few data structures (and an all-in-one one).
Very poor stdlib.
Still inherits of important JS warts like a schizophrenic "this".
Almost no runtime support if you don't transpile it (which means hard to debug and need specific tooling to build).
And it's by no mean the only scripting language having good support for typing (e.g: VSCode has great support for Python, including intellisens and type checking).
What's so fascinating about ?
What's fascinates me is that we are still stuck with a monopoly on JS for the most important platform in the world.
The typing system is what is special though, especially in how seamless it is in adding strict types alongside pure dynamic objects, but also allowing you to choose pretty much anything in the middle of that spectrum depending on your definitions.
You can have a few strong-typed properties mixed with others in a generic type that inherits from something else but can only take a few certain shapes. It's unlikely you need all that in most programs but it's the fact that you can do it which makes it great. In fact, the Typescript type system is actually turing complete.
Perhaps this video on Typescript from Build 2018 would help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDACN-BGvI8
That's pretty much my point.
> he typing system is what is special though, especially in how seamless it is in adding strict types alongside pure dynamic objects, but also allowing you to choose pretty much anything in the middle of that spectrum depending on your definitions.
> You can have a few strong-typed properties mixed with others in a generic type that inherits from something else but can only take a few certain shapes. It's unlikely you need all that in most programs but it's the fact that you can do it which makes it great. In fact, the Typescript type system is actually turing complete.
Apparently you haven't read my comment because I clearly says it's not special. Others languages do it to.
> Perhaps this video on Typescript from Build 2018 would help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDACN-BGvI8
Perhaps this article would help: https://www.bernat.tech/the-state-of-type-hints-in-python/
All services I've deployed built on rust pulls in a kitchen sink of deps.
Granted. I get a static binary as my end result, so maybe it's fine.
I think we had a generation of ecosystems with Node, Ruby, Python, that tried to do solve the unapproachable systems around the Java/etc ecosystems and make them more open.
They succeeded, but the next generation seems to have been about solving the plethora of tools that came with those languages. Rust, Go, etc, having first-party tools are trying to improve upon that, and yes I think Rust is by far the best implementation I've seen.
I'm interested to see what the next generation is.