For me, 2019 was a year of learning as much as I could about software quality – to the extent that I launched a blog to share many of my findings. ...
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Glad to see this. I’m an F# developer in a typical C# engineering group. The two languages get along fine because they’re both .NET. The functional paradigm scales up to real world solutions with few, if any, problems. I prefer functional programming to OOP at this point. It’s conceptually simpler once you’re past the initial learning curve.
I put my first F# code into production in the summer of 2009, and have completed a number of projects with it since, although in total I have done more C# work in that period. If I was free to choose without regard to any real-world constraints, I'd just switch over to F# (to the greatest extent possible).
Unfortunately, it doesn't (yet?) have critical mass, and this causes real-world limits on its adoption. Too many developers have got invested in the belief that OOP is the ultimate approach, and are simply not interested learning a whole new paradigm. The few that are interested quickly realize that its not likely to be a skill many employers are looking for.
I'll keep on evangelizing F#, and I'll keep using when I get the chance, but after ten years of campaigning for broader adoption, I'm don't hold much hope it will break of out its current niche.
And I'd switch jobs in a heart-beat to work with an organisation that was really embracing F#, but they are indeed few and far between.
Really nice article, thanks for sharing your insights. F# was my first introduction to the functional paradigm at my university, and Im grateful for being introduced to it that early in my studies while I still really hadn’t developed the usual preference for OO.
I do believe that the functional paradigm is on the rise given that more students are introduced to it as part of their degree - at least here here at danish universities. Im also about to take an intermediate F# unit at uni to dig a step deeper.
What do you think is the main hindering of larger adaption of F# (or functional in general)? Is it mostly because of the limited talent pool?
Cheers!
I think that F# (and FP in general) is simpler than C# (and OOP in general), but not easier. This has several implications:
forloops instead ofSeq.fold), at the cost of a slightly higher bug rate.This means that an FP developer will sometimes seem stuck on an isolated problem longer, because solving it with correct types and without side-effects can be like a puzzle. However, once the solution actually compiles and runs, it's likely to be superior to whatever an OOP programmer might slap together quicly.
So, eventually, I expect FP to be picked up by more disciplined teams creating large systems, while smaller projects will continue to be implemented in C#, Python, etc., where the benefits of FP don't matter as much.
Matt, what is your preferred Data Access Library when working with F#? What is the most elegant way (in your opinion) to interact with a RDBMS?
Thanks!