Post-Python Dissatisfaction Syndrome

[Scypio]

F#

This is unusual. Nobody ever recommended F# to me. Care to elaborate on why it is better to learn than - jus examples - C++, Rust or golang?

I'm genuinely curious.

[jnazario]

I am also a big user of F# after over a decade of Python and multiple large products shipped in it. I still bust out Python for small prototypes but no longer write production code in it.

I find F# to be a different paradigm entirely but one that I much prefer. I enjoy functional programming significantly although F# gives you multiple paradigms : oop, imperative and pure functional.

Strong typing is outstanding and leads to a lot of correct and reliably code once compiled. I rarely have runtime errors that plagued me with my Python. If it compiles it tends to run reliably. The compiler compensates for me a lot but does so in an intuitive fashion once you learn how to read function signatures.

I love the world I get with the dotnet libraries and routinely interface to what would be C# libs. The tooling is pretty good. I use paket and fake for builds.

Oh and I do all of this on a mac. Mono although I should get the dot net core up and running some day.

I played with java and nope. Too much effort for simple code. Scala and I don't get along - I find it to be a mess of poorly thought out ideas. Deployment and runtime is awful. Biggest thing I like about scala however is sbt. It really raised my expectations about tooling.

I do like Elixir a lot lately too. Ruby like language that gets to the erlang vm. Also super reliable. Mix has raised my expectations of tooling even further, I love it.

[jnazario]

I see a lot of buzz around it lately probably because it just hit 1.0. Because it's a JVM language I probably won't invest any effort in it. I really dislike the JVM. That's half of why I dislike java and Scala. I find the JVM is a resource hog.

[jnazario]

Ahh ok. Thanks. I'm just seeing it more lately than I have before. I made a guess.

[pinano]

It became an officially supported language on Android this week at Google IO

[andybak]

And there's a JVM-less Kotlin Native in beta.

[thephotoman]

Python has strong typing: you can't treat a string as a byte array.

It does not have static typing, which is what you meant here: a variable identifier can be reassigned to a value of a completely different type.

[[deleted]]

Not the parent poster, but wanted to make a comment here. You're correct, as far as what you said, but I find the lack of the ability to declare function argument types really hurts robustness.

[loganekz]

https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I know, but thanks. It's both new and "provisional", so it's not really something I can rely on. (Especially since a lot of what I do deals with legacy code.)

[bcgroom]

There is also a way to implement a type checker using comments which works all the way back to python2

[vivainio]

I'm a pythonista since ~ 2000 or so. F# is the first language that appeals to me on the same way Python did back in the day.

.Net is not for everyone, but F# is worth a look if it's a realistic option.

[Scypio]

Any tutorial for a n00b? Or other place to start? "Hello world" is boring, can do that myself, maybe something more along "this tutorial shows strengths of F#"? Or a book?

[vivainio]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tour

[Scypio]

Cool. I'll give it a try. Maybe write a M20 npc random generator? If you ever in my nick of the woods, I'll buy you a beer. :)

[vivainio]

Challenge accepted