Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikofeyn | Hacker News Reader

why don't you just use f#?

I've thought about it and wrote a bunch of trial software to test things. Primarily, I work on Linux even though I support Windows. There are also some features in OCaml that I like, which are not available on F# such as the module system, polymorphic variants, and, in the past, camlp4. While these can be worked around, the other use case is running the software on an HPC system using MPI. For me, the use of OCaml or F# is a glue, so I'm not worried about the performance. I am a little worried that the HPC administrators are going to have some difficulty getting the correct setup for F# across all the nodes. For OCaml I don't view this as much of a problem since it just produces binaries. Now, I absolutely could be wrong about this and I'd appreciate if someone where to chime in if so.

If you want to try F# w/o any installation, try it in Jupyter on Azure Notebooks:

https://notebooks.azure.com/Microsoft/libraries/samples/html...

Browse w/o loggin in, or if you want to edit/run/..., sign in, click Clone, then play around.

Cheers.

BTW, just a reminder of F# on .NET Core for fun (and profit?), and cross-platform support.

It’s not Microsoft’s primary language and unfortunately sometimes shows but now it’s there.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/g...

Now that you mention it, can somebody recommend some good starting points for learning F#? That language has been on my bucket list for far too long.

Here's a good place to start: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/

In addition to linking to other parts of the documentation, it links out to other third-party learning sources.

The "F# for fun and profit" site by Scott Wlaschin is a great jumping-off point: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

I discovered it when I was reading a lot about domain driven design, and I stumbled upon a talk by the author that kind of blew my mind:

"Domain Modeling Made Functional" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up7LcbGZFuo

"Expert F#" by Don Syme et. all. is a great starting point. It explains how to get started and contains lots of non-trivial code to type in and try out yourself. Don Syme designed F# as a no-nonsense industrial language and this book is a great introduction from that point of view.

Then there is "Programming language Concepts" by Sestoft - which, while being a language book, at the same time exposes lot of beautiful patterns how to exactly use F# for data munching.

Then, thirdly, Jon Harrop's "F# for scientist" is a great introduction for us that have a penchant foe writing numerical code (graphics or whatever). It's a great companion for the Expert F# as it shows how to use F# effectively in place of sonething like C++ or fortran.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com