

Announcing a pre-release of F# 3.1 and the Visual F# tools in Visual Studio 2013 - Associat0r
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2013/06/27/announcing-a-pre-release-of-f-3-1-and-the-visual-f-tools-in-visual-studio-2013.aspx

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inzax
Can anyone answer me why specifically should I use F#?

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tikhonj
There's really two separate _sets_ of reasons: one set for using .NET and one
for doing functional programming.

.NET is a good technology if you don't mind being somewhat tied to the
Mircrosoft stack: it's well designed, reasonably performant, strongly
supported and relatively stable. It has good integration with other Microsoft
products, good tooling with Visual Studio and an extensive set of libraries.
(The libraries are what would probably tie you the most strongly to
Microsoft.)

Functional programming is a much deeper topic, so I'll give my condensed and
unabashedly biased summary: functional languages tend to be more expressive
(and, transitively, more productive) while producing code that's easier to
support--F# has a good type system, and functional programming leads to much
lower coupling than OO much less procedural programming. This happens without
sacrificing performance _too_ much. Sure, you won't get C speed (or even C#
speed), but it's more than good enough for most tasks. I'm pretty sure F# is
at most a couple of times slower than C#-- _much_ faster than the popular
dynamically typed languages! I'm really only familiar with OCaml and Haskell,
both similar languages, and they can certainly produce fast code.

So if you're convinced by functional programming and somehow tied to .NET, F#
is the perfect choice. If you're not tied to .NET, I would recommend Haskell
or maybe OCaml instead.

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7manr82h
i would like to point out that i am using F# with emacs on linux with mono, i
made this transition recently from windows and i have no complaints yet.

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virtualwhys
What's the latest and greatest in terms of M$ feature availability on Mono
these days?

A couple of years ago whatever the successor to LINQ to SQL was at the time,
was not available/not implemented (maybe Entity Framework?)

Anyway, curious about doing equivalent of Scala + Play + Slick on Mono, which
I assume is F# + .NET + Type Providers/LINQ to SQL.

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7manr82h
i think i just haven't had anything that hasn't worked yet, and by this i
mean, i wrote my codebase for various projects in .net in vs2012, copying them
over to linux and just fsharpc, and it just works (although i confess i have
not touched linq\sql things), my advice, git clone and try. edit:spell

