F# 2 years later

08 Sep 2018

What’s the lure of F#?

The main lure of F# is that it’s a surprisingly competent ML style language that transcends some of the limitations of CIL.

From my point of view, the main distinguishing feature for F# is Statically Resolved Type Parameters. It’s a feature you don’t want to see in business code (same as reflection in C#), but something that enables libraries to take F# to the next level. Compare this to type classes in Haskell and what is called functors in OCaml.

What has delighted me?

• The editor tooling for F# has grown more stable.
• That F# has another perspective (compared to C#).
• Type providers can simplify one-off “scripting”.

What has been annoying?

Personally most of the pain points have been in dealing with .net core.

• Type providers have recently (2018/05/08) been fixed to work in .net core.
• Using libraries intended to be consumed in C# that uses Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection and Microsoft.Extensions.Options requires ceremony to use.

These are minor things. For the most part I don’t need dependency injection heavy code in the F# I’ve been writing.

Tags

• F#

---

Comments

Do you want to send a comment or give me a hint about any issues with a blog post: Open up an issue on GitHub.

Do you want to fix an error or add a comment published on the blog? You can do a fork of this post and do a pull request on github.