F#: What I've learnt so far
I did a presentation of some of the stuff that I’ve learnt from playing around with F# over the last six months or so at the most recent Alt.NET Sydney meeting.
I’ve included the slides below but there was also some interesting discussion as well.
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One of the questions asked was around how you would deal with code on a real project with regards to structuring it and ensuring that it was maintainable. I’m not actually sure what the answer is to this question as I haven’t written any code in F# that’s in production but there are certainly applications written n F# that are in production - the main one that I know a bit about is one which Amanda Laucher worked on which she spoke about at the Alt.NET conference in Seattle.
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There was some discussion about dynamic v static languages - Phil spoke of not caring about what type something is rather caring about what it does. I pretty much agree with this and I think when using languages which have quite strong type inference such as F# (and more-so Haskell from what I hear) then I think we do move more towards that situation.
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Erik raised the point that functional languages aren’t the solution for everything and I certainly feel it’s niche is probably around operations with heavy data parsing/mining involved. I’m not sure I’d fancy doing an ASP.NET MVC application only in F# although I’ve seen some WPF code written using F# (unfortunately can’t remember where) which looked reasonable so I’m not sure we should write it off just yet.
I’ve put the code that I walked through in the presentation on bitbucket.
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.