[agent281]

> I definitely recommend giving F# a try. I think it's an extremely underrated language.

Do you have any recommendations for people who do not have C#/.NET experience who want to rip their toes in F#? The last time I tried the language I bumped my head on the .NET parts. :/

[tombert]

Out of curiosity, what confused you about the .NET stuff? I didn't have any .NET experience going into F# either [1] and I didn't find it too hard to pick up the .NET stuff.

For the most part I didn't need most of the built in .NET libraries; the F# stuff was fine, but the ones I ended up using a lot were the threadsafe libraries for when I needed mutation across threads. ConcurrentDictionary was one I used an awful lot, ConcurrentBag occasionally, SemaphorSlim, and Interlocked Incrementors.

The reason that the .NET compatibility was handy to me was because it made it easy to get third party libraries without much fuss, which was great because they were generally pretty well supported.

The rule of thumb that I used was that F#, while it kind of looks like Haskell, is not Haskell, and specifically it's not lazy, and as such I always kind of pretended I was in the `do` block. Things execute top down, and you can mix in side effects wherever, so you kind of have to pretend everything is in an IO monad, or at least if you see anything that has a side effect in there.

[1] I was hired at Jet.com specifically because I had Haskell and Erlang experience prior. I had never written any significant C# code before.

[agent281]

I was working on a Linux laptop and the installation process wasn't immediately clear. Some of the frameworks I looked at didn't target the most recent .NET version so I had to install multiple versions. Once I had it installed, I had compilation failures with a project that was built on Windows. The team that ran it wasn't sure what was happening.

Also, having the documentation split between the F# parts on one site and the .NET parts on another site was a bit of a pain.

It might have gone better if I was starting with a book instead of picking docs off the web.

[progmetaldev]

Hopefully this website can get you further with the installation. There will probably still be issues between Windows and Linux specific tutorials, depending on what you are trying to do.

https://fsharp.org/use/linux/

[tombert]

Ah, yeah, the non-windows stuff was pretty clunky for awhile, but I do feel like it's gotten a bit better at the command line support.

FWIW I think it works fine with Nix, so if you're not opposed to using that package manager it should pretty trivial to get different versions working with a nix shell and/or flake.

[pjmlp]

It is a dream learning guest languages, while trying to avoid the platform, one really needs to understand UNIX, Web, .NET, Java, Erlang... for using whatever alternative leaky abstractions are provided on top of them.

In F#'s case, there are plenty of good books, and then it is really needed to learn the platform.

Some well known ones => Stylish F#, F# in Action, Domain Modeling Made Functional

[progmetaldev]

Thank you for the recommendations. I still find using a physical book easier to learn from, even if they do tend to be out of date faster than online resources. I feel as though F# doesn't move as fast as other parts of the .NET ecosystem, and in particular the Domain Modeling Made Functional seems like it will be relevant for years to come.

[agent281]

It's not so much that I don't want to learn the platform. It's that there is often an inherent sequencing. The expectation is you already know the platform and now you are learning the guest language. I just want to be taught the guest language and the platform at the same time.

[progmetaldev]

While a bit dated, F# For Fun and Profit is a great learning resource:

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/