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Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see that a lot of the respondents wrote basically the same thing I did: the documentation for actually making even a simple application in pure F# is basically non-existent.

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It's the same learning path as other MS stuff - by the books- which are pretty swell. http://fsharp.org/about/learning.html

I find more trivial examples and exploratory code out there (using type providers, etc), than complete examples that show best practices -- at least for web development.

I haven't come across any complete examples for simple web applications without too many dependencies that you can easily learn from

Expert F# 3.0 by Don Syme et all contains quite a lot of example code, including a simple web app using asp.

Have you looked at http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ ? This site contains lots of useful information and would be enough to get started. Another possibility is to read a few books, e.g., Expert F# 3.0, F# Deep Dives.

What do you mean pure F#?

Majority of providers in FSharp.Data [1] are idiomatic F# code (also contains imperative & a bit of C#ness to use lib outside F#)

1. http://fsharp.github.io/FSharp.Data/

What I mean is writing a desktop application without falling back to using C# for all the front-end code and relegating F# to being a glorified DSL for data processing.

Microsoft doesn't believe anyone wants to make apps in F#; Visual Studio doesn't even come with templates for it. You're expected to use F# to write libraries like Fsharp.Data, and write your app code in C#.

If I wanted to code in C#, I'd code in C#, but I don't.

    open System.Windows.Forms
 
    [<EntryPoint>]
    let main argv = 
        let form = new Form()
        let button = new Button()
        button.Text <- "Click me"
        button.Click.Add (fun _ -> MessageBox.Show "Hello" |> ignore)
        form.Controls.Add button
        Application.Run form
        0

jarcane didn't say you can't he said the documentation is all but non-existant

I have written thousands of pages of example applications in articles for the F# Journal.

There are some decent samples on MSDN, 56 in F# at the time of writing. Most aren't GUI apps, but some are.

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/site/search?f%5B0%5D.Type=Pr...

My "WPF Image Cropper" sample might be interesting to you - pure F# WPF via XAML type provider. I am not a GUI dev, though, so it's probably crap design :)

A desktop app on Windows either uses WPF or WinForms. In either case F# doesn't stop at all. In fact I would say that building WPF desktop on F# is more intuitive than C#.

Templates for F# projects, by the F# community, for use in Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio and other editors https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharpCommunityTemplates also go to http://fsharp.org/ or ask a question on S.O. or Twitter with tag #fsharp.

And then there is also WebSharper http://websharper.com/

I would also like to add that F# is functional, imperative & OOP language. If any program uses any combination of these, it is still the F# code. But I agree there has to be more taste of "F#" since it is a functional first language.

I love F#, and I was looking at Idris for a more functional program verification, theorem-proving language. Then I stumbled upon F* (Fstar) - https://www.fstar-lang.org/ It is like F# but uses the Z3 solver, and is very ML like.

F# Journal articles walk through the design and implementation of dozens of different example applications including both client GUI and server with sockets and so on.

That's not true. There are loads of web learning resources for it.

I literally know of only a single pure F# application tutorial on the internet, Scott W.'s Calculator, and the style reads more like Java than any idiomatic FP code I've ever seen.

There's scattered bits here and there elsewhere, but none actually present a complete picture of the process. They wind up resembling, as one survey respondant suggested, feeling like the old "how to draw an owl": Step 1) draw the eyes, Step 2) Draw everything else.

From Microsoft itself

"Real World Functional Programming" - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh314518%28...

Some higher level presentations - https://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/fsharp

Then there are the Erik Meijer teaching FP series, even though they are based on Haskell, given their ML common roots is also a good series to follow.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Func...

This might sound a bit stupid, but I was looking into F# a while ago (26 days ago, if the timestamps of the few files I wrote don't lie :-) ) and now I'm wondering I could have found those things (especially RWFP because I usually don't like learning from videos) if I start on fhsarp.org?

http://fsharp.org/about/learning.html does not list them, and going from http://fsharp.org/about/index.html via the "Language Reference" link to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233181.aspx doesn't list RWFP in the sidebar anymore.

I did a post last year on writing websites in F#. I personally recommend doing everything up to the API layer in F# e.g. restfully, and sticking to something like typescript on the client side. If you want a full F# end-to-end story check out something like Websharper or one of the F# <> JS cross compilers.

https://cockneycoder.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/lightweight-we...

There are 182 articles in the F# Journal.

The F# News blog has had many applications on it:

http://fsharpnews.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/most-popular-f-samp...

So has Phil Trelford's blog:

http://trelford.com/blog/

And many others.

Rather than disagreeing, it might be helpful if you suggest a few complete (but simple) application tutorials written in F#. I'd be interested in that too.

Perhaps there are now, but several years ago I felt that it was hard to come by.

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