[problems]

The problem I had going into this without a strong functional background is that often times to do practical things you're forced to work with .NET libraries - these .NET libraries are not nice functional libraries and don't encourage you to think functionally. Eventually I felt like everything I wrote was wrong and I just gave up on it.

[jackmott]

F# can be a nice language even if you don't care for the functional paradigm.

Discriminated Unions and pattern mactching still come in handy, the syntax is still less verbose, there is less biolerplate/ceremony than in C# where everything has to be in a class.

it is easier to pass a function to a function than in C#

inlining functions is easier

the type inference can be useful in various ways.

if/then/else statements being expressions is extremely nice.

I tend to code in a mostly imperative style, even in F#. I understand it better, it usually performs better.

[pmarreck]

Sounds like the same issue I had with Clojure and Scala. As soon as you touch anything Java or mutable, it's like WTF?

Come to the Elixir/Erlang camp; our functional turtles go all the way down! The only jarring thing is having to write to a mutable database. They even borrowed the |> operator! And it has great pattern matching of course.

[problems]

Yeah, Elixir or Haskell is probably the way I'll wind up going if I want to pursue functional programming again. I can do the basics enough to handle LINQ well and stuff, so I'm getting away without a strong knowledge for now.

One of the biggest disappointments in software development to me though is that practically all of the cool libraries these days are hitting the javascript ecosystem rather than those of all the interesting languages.

So if you want to interact with these great libraries, you have to tolerate a pretty shitty language with annoying tooling at best. So when I want to do something practical, I wind up going that way disappointingly often.

[davidgl]

Or use both: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HLs6WgAmX64

[pmarreck]

Holy crap. Interesting!

[orderlyoctopus]

I definitely agree. Trying to jump into F# without any knowledge of .NET just requires so much mind-juggling. As a beginner, so much of the difficulty and frustration comes from the fact that you are missing so much foundation knowledge that you don't know what to ask or look for, and may not even recognize the answer. Interop won't look or behave or be optimized how you expect and will just wreak havoc with your attempts to build a mental model of what you're learning because of the strange inconsistency.

Sometimes the answer is just so obvious to people who have that foundation knowledge that no one else has bothered to ask on reddit/stackoverflow and you are googling into the wind. Sometimes the only thing you can find is several years old and giving advice that's no longer correct. I'm not sure which is worse.

I had the same trouble trying to build a learning project in Clojure. I remember when starting, I had only used pip and apt-get (and not knowing them well), I didn't even recognize Leiningen as a package manager. It worked so differently from what I thought I needed (and billed itself as a "project automation and configuration tool") that I didn't even recognize it was the solution to my problem.

It's just so easy to take for granted how many things are obvious to us that make solving problems in our comfort zone easy for us and paralyzing for another person, and I think this bias finds its way into the documentation and mindset of entire communities. This makes it harder and harder for something to be approachable if you don't fit in that same box. I'd love to love F#, (I read F# for fun and profit and worked through the F# Koans, but haven't made anything), but I'm not sure if I'll ever get over the hump unless I find myself working somewhere that's already using it. My feelings on Python are somewhere between ambivalent and bitter by now, but the work gets done, I know what to expect, and I never feel lost.

What would really help me, I think:

- More "idiomatic" wrapper libraries around .NET libraries, even if they're slower or have less features/customization.

- Pure F# libraries of typical utilities or ports of popular libraries in other languages, even if they are slower or have less features/customization.

- Content about F# project management from the perspective of someone who uses Python. This is how you do it in Python, this is how you do it in F#, this is why, these are the pros, these are the cons, these are just different because that's the way it is.

[throwaway7645]

I can't upvote your comment enough. Learning F# w/o .NET and Clojure without JVM knowledge is next to impossible. There is no good doc despite what people say (and I own several books in this space). Scott W's F# articles are great for foundational FP, but neither that, any of the F# books, or any of the online tutorials show me how to do even simple things like iterate through a file. I'd love to see "Basic Office Programming in F#".

[jackfoxy]

For what it is worth, the Microsoft docs are getting easier to navigate. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ They are currently putting a lot of effort into docs. It's got to be hard to learn .NET from zero. Try figuring out which namespaces are the most common and start browsing the docs.

[orderlyoctopus]

I really disagree with Microsoft's approach of homogenizing their products, and this is a perfect example.

- There's never a need for "Microsoft" documentation -- you'll have a question with a specific product or service. They really should be distinctive visually.

- This is on the microsoft domain and top left click goes to microsoft.com, but you can't get back here from microsoft.com

- By the time I click through to something (for example, .NET->F#->Get Started), I have not one but two major navbars and footer featuring prominent links and menus completely orthogonal to what I'm viewing. There is nearly zero typographical variation among the content I've expressed interest in (F#), and tons of variation for this separate content. This is distracting.

[Rapzid]

I've never had that problem with AWS and their docs are EXTENSIVE and homogeneous.

Honestly, I've always found the .NET(C#) docs pretty good even going into naming conventions and design patterns. However I'm open to improvement as they were looking a bit dated and I often had trouble ending up in docs for older versions of software/OS's.

[fulafel]

What problems did you run into with Clojure? I haven't missed JVM/Java experience. The Clojure standard library provides nearly everything and third party Clojure libraries wrap Java libs. Off the top of my head, the only Java thing normal code sometimes references is numerics, so you might glimpse Long/MAX_VALUE or Math/sqrt.

[throwaway7645]

A lot of things require you to specify the Java namespace like the "swing" demo. Iterating through a folder was similar. There are several Clojure books explaining FP concepts, but not much in the realm of here is how you do basic task "x". This isn't perfect in any language, but I've never had trouble with Perl, Python, C#, Java, Fortran...etc.

[jackmott]

https://gist.github.com/jackmott/988b4742394cf5e7d331e31c0ee...

[insulanian]

For starters this is enough and less confusing IMHO:

    open System.IO

    for line in File.ReadLines("/path/to/file") do
        printfn "%s" line

[enricosada]

Or using awesome |> pipeline operator

    "/path/to/file"
    |> File.ReadLines
    |> Seq.iter (printfn "%s")

the printfn can be expanded as function, instead of partial app

    "/path/to/file"
    |> File.ReadLines
    |> Seq.iter (fun line -> printfn "%s" line)

[throwaway7645]

If you could make about 50 more of these snippets...I'd be using F# everyday :)

[jackmott]

boom http://fssnip.net/

[smoothdeveloper]

Thing is that putting together short helpers for the "nasty" bits often revolve around 1 line helpers.

You can do so along the way without focusing so much on doing idiomatic FP and achieve both pragmatic and palatable results.

Designing solutions with the type system enabled by F# and it's ability to interop with whole .NET ecosystem is really a powerful combination.

[orderlyoctopus]

It's very hard to do it along the way if you aren't familiar with C# either. Now you're struggling to get your head around both paradigms as well as however the thing you're trying to do works.

I doubt I would have ever stuck with Clojure longer than a day, for example, if it wasn't for this library. It's not very long and all the functions are very short, but it meant that everything I needed from the file system was a 30s peek at the documentation and exactly what I expected rather than ~30+ minutes futzing with Java and forgetting what I was doing in the process https://github.com/Raynes/fs

[smoothdeveloper]

> It's very hard to do it along the way if you aren't familiar with C# either.

Which I keep overlooking with so many years of C#, I'm so sorry about that :(

That being said, looking at the .NET framework documentation and hanging out on fsharp.org's slack might be a good way to make up for what you are missing to get started.

[orderlyoctopus]

If I ever get up the nerve to give it a real try, I will certainly test the slack's patience for stupid questions :)

The .NET reference is useful if you are reading through code and maybe to modify it slightly, but I find it (and class hierarchy style docs in general) to be close to useless if you are writing new code and new to the library. Using a new library in Python (especially one that's heavily object oriented), I often find it easier to learn from tests instead of the docs. Reference docs are often inaccurate or too verbose or show no sense of importance or are just poorly written. Tests are straight to the point, include examples, and tend to focus on the most important parts of the library.

The MSDN docs have quite a bit of "How do I..." content, but unfortunately F# is seemingly always blank as an example.

Combine this with a huge proportion of commonly used third party libraries being .NET rather than F# libraries, and so much of the .NET infrastructure you need to use being C# focused, and as a newcomer you are paralyzed.

If F# is serious about building a community of more than just C# converts, they need to recognize that the convenience of .NET for people who already know it carries a commensurate tax for everyone who doesn't. It's harder for me to learn .NET as an F# user than a C# user. It's harder for me to learn to use NuGet as an F# user than a C# user. It's harder for me to learn to use Visual Studio as an IDE with F# than C#. In everyone of these scenarios, you're running up hill because examples and documentation and interfaces are all for the majority, which you won't be.

[yawaramin]

These are some excellent points. There's no organised, searchable F# package index. We rely heavily on NuGet, which is a generalised .Net mishmash. And we suffer from the same problems that almost every other non-dominant language does when targeting a runtime dominated by another language.

The best I can offer you right now for F#-specific packages is http://fsharp.org/community/projects/ --and the advice that, if you have questions, ask away! F# people will be, I think, extremely ready to answer any questions because we're desperate to see people use the language. Try the mailing list ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fsharp-opensource ), https://fsharp.reddit.com/ and the Functional Programming Slack at fpchat.com (well, this one will be back online in a few days--they recently had some drama, which they settled, but they had to disable new signups to let everyone cool down).

[throwaway7645]

If they're desperate, please tell someone to write a book for noobs. I opened The Book of F# and recoiled in horror. The whole book was basically if you're a C# expert, here is how F# is different...or at least a lot of it.

[vosper]

I had the same feeling with Clojure. I'm not sure it's due to not having a strong functional background; I think it might be the reality of interop between very different languages.

[orderlyoctopus]

Definitely. Understanding Clojure/Java interop to consume a library requires that you understand both Clojure and Java far more than you would need to if you were to consume a library native to whatever you were using.

[vosper]

That's one of the reasons I gave up on Clojure, though I think it could be a good option if you're coming from the Java world.

[brianberns]

Can you give an example? I think F# has nice functional replacements for most of the nasty (mutable) bits of the .NET Framework, such as List, Set, Dictionary, etc. Most of the other areas of .NET work just fine with F# in my experience.