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by mjul 1708 days ago
Type providers are novel.

It is a mechanism to provide type safe access to structured data and data services with almost no code. It feels like magic.

Like other ML-derived languages (F# is an OCaml dialect) it has algebraic data types and pattern matching to make code simple and complete without missing edge cases.

Also, it is arguably the best functional language on .NET, so it has a great platform with a large ecosystem to build on. And the tooling is great (Jetbrains, Microsoft IDEs).
2 comments
runevault 1708 days ago
I haven't done as much as I would like with them, but I feel like until someone tries type providers they don't get just how powerful they are. Being able to point to an example .csv file and have it generate the classes for you, and update them if you change said format, in a way that it ensures the types still work, is amazing. And you can do it for ANYTHING as long as you have a way to extract the data to feed it to the compiler.

I still need to learn how to write a type provider just so I can.

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aloisdg 1708 days ago
> it is arguably the best functional language on .NET,

it is also the only real one. On .NET we have C#, C++ and vb.net then there are some other fringe langs like IronPython or IronRuby and I think there is a PHP one too.

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aloisdg 1708 days ago
I forgot Boo and Nemerle. They are quite niche languages though.
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