Re: F# fsharp

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm unconvinced, for example, that F# has a sufficiently low learning curve to escape the ghetto of companies whose
> decision-making process centers around "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" -- even with first-class support for
> Mono.  While the imprimatur of the Microsoft branding may force programmers to swallow the bitter pill of learning
> something considerably foreign to what they are used to, that's far less useful than if it was so interesting that people
> who aren't saddled with C++ (or even C#) coveted it.

I am also unconvinced about the learning curve, unfortunately.  I hope
F# will be successful, but it IS quite a risk.  And while I don't have
a citation to back this right here, I believe that VB.Net is more
popular than C# for even C#'s difficulty of learning curve.

What makes F# (I think) interesting, is the fact that a team can quite
transparently inter-operate between all of the CLR languages without
being forced to learn that they're doing it.  And again, I think the
reason for F#'s being is multiprocessing.

An aside on Haskell.  I had Dijkstra as a professor and (though I
didn't learn functional programming from him), I had the opportunity
to speak with him about Haskell.  In our little talk, I asserted
(among other things) that it was fun.  After a pause (Dijkstra always
considered his words carefully), he agreed: Haskell is fun.

In fact, the fun I had learning Haskell is the reason I learned F# and
if you want to stay purely functional (and you might do so because
there are many, many benefits), know that F# has all of the language
features you need to allow you to do that.  There's no need for a
Haskell zealot to turn their nose up at F#.

I'd say that anyone who enjoys Haskell would probably enjoy F#.  You
might even learn something new about programming.

Finally, between Haskell and F#, if I were making a business decision,
I'd go with the one that I thought solved the problems I had and could
more easily inter-operate with the other languages I'm using.  That
might be Haskell sometimes.  In fact, I wish it WOULD be Haskell more
often as that is the underdog language that SHOULD have been more
popular, but F# has quite a significant advantage here because when
schedules crunch, you're not stuck in just one language or with just
one language's library support.
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