I'm a bit torn on this subject. I spent the last 3 years of the 'hands on' part of my dev career swapped over to F# from many, many years of writing predominantly C#, and it was a fantastic experience. Don Syne's main pitch these days is to think of F# as a productivity language first, and a FP language second, and I would support that view. Much of what F# pioneered in the .net space has indeed come over to C# in recent versions, but as a result C# syntax has grown significantly, and I see engineers having to talk each other out of 'bad practices' to use new idioms. You don't get that in F# - the 'right way' is just the default to start with, and you have to go out of your way to do the reverse (mutable code, side-affecting structures etc...). Rather than FP, just think 'nicer C#'. That said, as a manager now, I'd have to be completely honest that it does present some real issues, principally around recruitment and/or ramp-up. I personally thought the cross-skilling was easy (~2-3 weeks), but even allowing for that, it's still an impost, and there is an entirely legitimate view that it's just one more thing engineers have to think about. F# hasn't been ported to Roslyn (Roslyn can't yet cope with tail calls I believe), which then excludes some tooling (like static analysis). And Microsoft themselves were gently dissuasive when the subject of using it for a particular project was brought up by the team. So ultimately I think the question comes down to productivity and cognitive load. F# does a fantastic job (I think) of reducing those, but at the cost of biting off some up-front cross-skilling. The latter cost is very real and tangible, and the former is quite a lot harder to pin down and measure. Ultimately in my case the engineering team came to the conclusion they had enough on their plate to worry about already, and I can't help but sympathise with that. That said, any code I write at home, or just to prove a point, I write in F#. I'm never going back. Piers On Thu, 30 Jun 2022 at 10:31, Tom Gao via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
I used F# for my doctorate as a modelling language to build out a prototype for a security integration platform I developed.
The problem is that there are very few people who use F# afaik. Getting any commercial code developed will create a problem for ongoing support. Just my view.
btw. this is a long shot. I'm looking for a senior digital PM in sydney does anyone know of anyone good who might be interested? (I'm not a recruiter but just desperate to get a project going)
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 3:42 PM David Burstin via ozdotnet < ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:
Hi folks,
It's been about a year since I asked, so here it is again. Does anyone know of any F# work being done in Melbourne, or anywhere in Australia?
I've managed to do some small F# helper apps for my employer, but 98% of what I do is C#. I'd really love to find somewhere that uses F#.
On the plus side - F# has helped improve my C# approach dramatically, and C# is constantly introducing more functional ideas (although discriminated unions and active patterns would be lovely).
So, anyone know anything?
Cheers David -- ozdotnet mailing list To manage your subscription, access archives: https://codify.mailman3.com/
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-- piers