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by yawaramin 3402 days ago
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).
1 comments
throwaway7645 3402 days ago
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.
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yawaramin 3402 days ago
Sorry, you picked the wrong book to start with. Its blurb page says: 'If you're a traditional .NET developer used to C# and Visual Basic, discovering F# will be a revelation that will change how you code.... Break free of that old school of programming.'

Try Pickering & Eason's Beginning F# 4.0; its intro has a 'Who Is This Book For?' section, which says: 'This book is aimed primarily at IT professionals.... A working knowledge of the .NET framework ... would be nice, but it's not necessary.'

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throwaway7645 3401 days ago
Lol I learned that very fast while reading through :)

Isn't 4.0 pretty far out of date now?

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yawaramin 3401 days ago
Just putting it out there for the next person who sees this :-)

F# 4.0 is not really out of date. The language is fairly fixed now--apart from fixing buggy behaviour actually.

Part of it is that the general ML syntax is pretty timeless--all ML books share this advantage. As for F# specifically, all the headline functionality--type providers, quotations etc.--has been there for a while. I expect books covering 4.0 to be remarkably future-proof.

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throwaway7645 3400 days ago
Thanks!
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