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by thedataangel 2816 days ago
In my experience, languages that try to bridge OO and functional ecosystems (F#, Scala, etc) tend to suffer from a lot of split-brain / "worst of both worlds" syndrome. You miss a lot of the advantages of FP unless you go all-in on it like Haskell does.
2 comments
nestorD 2815 days ago
My experience with F# is that functional programming is the default paradigm while object oriented is used when it is required or easier (or required by a C# library you really want). A striking difference with the little Scala I read in the wild (where object oriented was the clear default).

The same goes for mutability, it is there and you should certainly use it when it makes sense but it is not the default.

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thedataangel 2815 days ago
> The same goes for mutability, it is there and you should certainly use it when it makes sense but it is not the default.

This is also true for Haskell. It's not especially hard to get and use mutable variables, they're just not something that most tutorials cover.

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nybble41 2815 days ago
Haskell has confined mutation with the State and ST types, which guarantees that whatever may be going on inside, the external interface to the function is pure. My main problem with F# (and other multi-paradigm / "functional-first" languages) is that they do not provide any such guarantees; purity becomes merely a matter of convention and convenience, not something ensured by the language. This misses the entire point of functional programming, IMHO, which is referential transparency, and greatly increases the complexity since there are things that matter in F#, like evaluation order, which purity renders completely irrelevant in Haskell.

(Yes, Haskell does have unsafePerformIO and the like for special cases, but the expectation is still that the external interface remains pure. If you deliberately circumvent the language's protections and fail to adhere to this rule then you get to keep both pieces when it inevitably breaks. The compiler is still going to operate under the assumptions that the result depends only on the explicit inputs and that evaluating the function has no side effects.)

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vmchale 2816 days ago
> You miss a lot of the advantages of FP unless you go all-in on it like Haskell does.

I'm not familiar with F# but Scala at least has a far inferior compiler (compared to GHC). There are a lot of functional techniques that simply don't make sense when you don't have dedicated tooling to support them.

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