Re: F# fsharp

On May 27, 2010, at 4:00 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Jedd Haberstro <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If you weren't adequately informed about the topic at hand (whether C# +
>> Mono is a viable scripting solution due to the availability of a REPL and
>> loading scripts on the fly) and you knew it, why did you choose to respond
>> in the first place? That's just asking to be ripped on for trolling,
>> because, well, it is.
> 
> Or it could be, that some of you think we're supposed to spend all day
> RTFM before we say or do anything, and that to fail to do so with 100%
> accuracy is an unforgivable offense.  I've met that kind of programmer
> plenty of times, and frankly they annoy me, especially since I *do*
> actually RTFM religiously 90% of the time.  By the time I actually
> post about something, I've read a *lot* of stuff, to bring a
> discussion to the level that I want it.  Because I know that so many
> techies are going to play the game of shooting people down because
> someone said one tiny wrong "unforgivable" thing.  Sometimes I ask

On the other hand, we live in a subset of reality where tiny details have disproportionate impact.  It's perfectly fine to not have all the information -- the purpose of discussion is the sharing of information, after all -- but when someone hands you information on a silver platter and you very obviously refuse to consume it, then you come off looking like someone who is not interested in acquiring information.

If you cannot bother with basic standards of courtesy, such as bothering to try and grasp the point being made before responding, then you may find it advantageous to not respond.  "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."


> myself why I bother to talk to techies about anything in public
> forums, because generally they will not be convinced, but I guess I'm

Ironically enough, that's precisely how we view you.


> thread.  About F#, not C#.  Whether Mono C# actually has an
> interpreter is a minor detour as far as I'm concerned.

Yes.  It's a minor detour.  I provided the link for the sake of accuracy of discourse.  A proposition with a handful of supporting arguments that stand out as untrue becomes suspect overall.

You will note that I did NOT respond to your other points.  That was because I was not trying to counter your argument, and I didn't have enough information to weigh in meaningfully about any other point.  I limited myself to the one area I had relevant information, consumed the remaining information, and will evaluate when I've actually sat down and played with F# at length.


> Between Lua and F#, leaving .NET and CLR interop completely out of it,
> which language has the better semantics for scripting?  F# would seem
> to let you do more, at the expense of being more obtuse to the
> uninitiated.

A more interesting point is that CLR interop allows one to make hard decisions about such things later on in the process -- or not at all.  There may be some tiny niche where it makes sense to use Lua even if you're using F# for most everything else.  Or perhaps your organization is heavily invested in Lua but you'd like to be able to trial F# on a project without making it a huge risk by reducing it to an either-or choice.


> Both F# and Lua allow one to create DSLs, which can answer some
> "dumbing down" problems, such as they are.  I'm going to hazard a
> guess that it would be easier to do arbitrary DSL stuff in F#.

If you see DSLs as being about "dumbing down", then you've missed the point.  The point is they provide a more elegant way of abstracting *intent* from *implementation* than pure OO / procedural abstractions. They can allow for greater clarity / maintainability of code AND make it easier to produce application code.  The goals are not mutually exclusive.

-JF

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