Hacker News Reader

Comment by tejinderss | Hacker News Reader

Now that .net is going cross platform, I see a great future of f# (another variant of ML family). Its got multi processors support too.

View on HN

I think most people who wanted a cross-platform, VM-based, corporate-ecosystem-integrated ML derivative with good concurrency support have already found Scala :P.

The problem with Scala is that you don't just get ML -- you have to accept everything else that comes along -- so F# can be a more comfortable choice.

It might be easier to accept the additional parts of Scala, because the creators didn't design them to be an tacked-on, intentionally horrible feature. (OO in F#/OCaml anyone?)

Plus, sane typeclasses and higher-kinded types. :-)

I agree and I think F# would look a lot more attractive to functional programmers if it had some type of polymorphism other than the C#-like generics and traditional OO subtyping.

I can understand not choosing to go the ML route "down the Functor rat hole" as one of its developers said. But then it also chooses not to do the simpler type classes either. Apparently a proper impl would need CLR changes which is a downside to the reified generics, they are baked in as C#/VB imagined them. That leaves a language that conceptually is very close to C#/VB, with a somewhat different syntax.

I find either of typeclasses or an ML-like module system far preferable for expressing abstractions than traditional ("left-biased") OO, even if OO can (clumsily) get the same results in other ways.

Or I may have missed some developments in F# since I last looked. I really hope so, F# does have a lot going for it.

I've looked but not touched Scala. My impressions are A: Rather verbose. B: Carries a lot more OO/Java baggage. C: I've heard that the performance can be underwhelming.

A: Sometimes there is a small price to pay for gracefully unifying OO and FP (for example using sealed trait/case classes for ADTs, instead of having standard OO classes + a special additional ADT feature)

But it doesn't really matter. Some pieces might be slightly more verbose, but Scala is more concise in the long run, not because of saving some syntactic stuff here and there, but due to being able to express things which just aren't expressible in OCaml or F#.

If you want some shorter, more ML-like syntax, just pick a different parser https://github.com/lihaoyi/Scalite and have fun.

B: Unlike in OCaml/F#, OO is not "baggage". Scala took the good parts of OO and made them even better. OCaml/F# feel like the language creators tried to make a point about disliking OO by making OO support terrible on purpose. Scala demonstrates that having good FP support doesn't mean OO support need to be terrible.

Some of the stuff for Java support is a bit annoying, though, but doesn't matter in practice.

C: Performance is on par with Java. Scala can leverage the most powerful JIT-compilers and the world's best Garbage Collectors known to man. Does OCaml have working support for concurrency yet?

Is there somewhere one can follow the Mac and Linux ports? I'm stoked about F#/OCaml too.

Have you tried Mono and Monodevelop? I have used C# with Mono and for back-end work (non-GUI) and it works pretty well so far. I think they have F# support as well.

I can confirm that MonoDevelop works reasonably well for F#, but the documentation for F# on Mono isn't great. Coming from OCaml, I love F# as a language, but the tooling isn't as good as it is for OCaml. Might be better on Windows with VS, but I haven't looked closely at that.

F# seems like a very nice language, but it won't really be compelling outside of the Microsoft bubble until it's divorced from the thick layer of Microsoft .CORP Brand Identity 2010, Visual Studio Visual Studio Visual Studio, and posts from Microsoft Outreach Engineers.

Compare these two Stack Overflow "getting started with" answers for Haskell http://stackoverflow.com/a/1016986 and F# http://stackoverflow.com/a/11974625 With the Haskell answers I don't know or care what platforms, operating systems, editors, or IDEs they are using. With the Microsoft answer it's like a dystopian scene filled with Branding, Branding, and more Branding.

Personally, I spend a lot of time experimenting with languages and ecosystems and the ".NET" platform is the only one where I feel the need to put on a plaid shirt and dockers with a Windows Phone on my belt and schedule a conference call with a committee at Microsoft to tell them to give it a rest already.

mac:

brew install mono

run f# console/repl: fsharpi

compile files: fsharpc file.fs

Not sure about linux, but should be simple as well.

And as with Haskell and cabal, you have FAKE ( http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/ ) which isn't exactly the same but similar

The main difference between those two answers is that for Haskell, the author pointed to generic Haskell resources while F# pointed to windows ones. I've been developing with F# for a while on the Mac and found no issues whatsoever. There is also MonoDevelop/Xamarin if you want a more complete IDE which is better than anything I found for Haskell (but there maybe new stuff I'm missing, having messed with Haskell in a while) but SublimeText and Vim work fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com