Category: F#

If you’ve been following along with my posts over the past six months or so you can probably imagine that I’ve been asked some variation of this post’s title more than a few times. One question that I keep getting is why I chose F# over some other functional languages like Haskell, Erlang, or Scala. The problem with that question though is that it’s predicated on the assumption that I actually set out to learn a functional language. The truth is that moving to F# was more of a long but natural progression from C# rather than a conscious decision.

The story begins about two and a half years ago. I had pretty much burned out and was deep into what I can only begin to describe as a stagnation coma. I stopped attending user group meetings; I cut way back on reading; I pretty much stopped…

I recently read F# for C# Developers by Tao Liu. As usual, the disclaimer is that I received a copy of the book for free in return for the review. This one was a challenge. Not because of the programming paradigm shift from imperative driven programming in C# to functional programming in F#, but because the density of the book and my having read a different book on F# rather recently.

Mr Liu is most certainly an expert on F#, both from his work at Microsoft and this book. However there were times when I felt a little frustrated in reading the book. My favourite chapter of this book was Chapter 3 where he examines design patterns which can be found in C# and then applies these patterns to F# code. It remains dense reading, but it demonstrates those patterns very well. Mr Liu takes the notion, as I read…