| I've experienced sort of a diagonal problem to this. F# is way too entwined with .NET to be immediately useful to programmers familiar with Ocaml or Scala or Haskell, etc. Some of the basic List., Array. stuff is simple enough, but then you start talking about interfaces and classes and members and all this stuff that doesn't really translate from C#->sanity very well. I know people love it, but I've long considered C#/Java to be kludge languages on platforms they don't deserve. The JVM might be the most impressive software engineering marvel I can think of, and yet on top of that christmas tree stands a tall, stinky shit. I'd love to see F# as a F#-first platform, and offer .NET interop as a secondary language feature. I've also noticed a concerning trend in F# circles that """diversity""" should be celebrated. There is no merit in your skin color or your genitals. If you can hack well, you deserve to do so. End of story. A counterpoint to the F# being poisoned by .NET is Clojure. Look how well Clojure did Java interop and how "not a big deal it is." Immutability everywhere, functional by default, and it feels painful to do things the Java way in Clojure. F# doesn't mind at all if you sink to .NET trickery and in some cases require it. I could think of more, but off the top of my head, the .split instance method comes to mind. I have a Markov Chain kata that I spring on new hires to see how they do things, and .split is an instance method, which is counter-intuitive to how functional problems are solved because you don't just |> into it. I'm waiting to see where Clojure goes with core.type before I abandon F#. I really WANT to keep riding the F# train but it causes quite a few headaches. Not more than it solves, but more than other solutions that I've considered. To balance this out, I'll say something I really love about F#. Units of measure. Few languages have this, and the kind of numerical work we do means we really get our mileage out of UoM. I always see finance horror stories or like the excel rounding bug, it makes me wonder exactly how much money UoM has saved us from losing through some innocent type somewhere. Debugging money code is way easier when you can verify all the conversions separately from the logic. It feels like cheating, to be totally honest. I know there are big shops out there that don't have UoM in their tools, and I used to feel bad for them, but now that we have it, I can't help but NOT feel bad for them. Anyways, yeah, F# isn't perfect. There's plenty to be said also for the amount of progress they make with language updates. It grows a crazy amount between major versions, and I haven't had too much problems yet taking old F#3.0 code and revitalizing it. Very pleasant experience in that regard as well. |