Programming F# – Official Cover

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Programming F# ??? Official Cover | ASP NET Hosting — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:55:28 GMT

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Programming F# – Official Cover - Chris Smith

DotNetShoutout — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:15:33 GMT

Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

Indy — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:01:53 GMT

I like the cover and the metaphore of the jellyfish. The only thing though, according to the latest National Geographic's article jellyfish is the favorite meal of the giant leatherback turtle. Perhaps the turtle deserves a consideration for the cover since it is deadly to the jellyfish. Just kidding!

Anyway, I'm an F# enthusiast, doing mostly C# development for my day-job. I'm currently reading 'Expert F#' and have to admit that certain parts of it take more than one pass to understand.

I'm looking forward to your book publication. Good luck.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

snk_kid — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:33:01 GMT

Your sly "awesome" comment is a bit immature and only hurts the F# community.

I like both F# and haskell but it seems as though you don't quite comprehend the awesomeness of Haskell's type system.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

ChrSmith — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:42:03 GMT

I'm well aware of Haskell's awesome type system, but I needed a programming language to beat on.

"C# doesn't have it" doesn't work because there are already a lot of things C# doesn't have that F# does - function values, algebraic data types, etc.

"Java doesn't have it" doesn't work for more obvious reasons than C#. The same is true for PHP, C++, and others.

Perhaps Python would have been a better choice; though I have empirical evidence that Python does in fact support 'awesome' http://www.xkcd.com/353/

I appreciate your comment. But I assure you that I in no way am trying to criticize Haskell.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

DanF — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:55:12 GMT

Hey Chris, you mentioned meta-programming in F#. How does that work?

I've been programming in Common Lisp lately so I've gained a new appreciation for it -- can F# compete or is Clisp the leatherback turtle? :P

-Dan

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

DanF — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:13:55 GMT

I should point out, I mean can F#'s meta programming facilities compete with Common Lisp's macros.

Don't want to start a language holy war.

I read up a bit on the "F# quotation" business and it looks really awkward compared to Clisp's... still curious to read your take on it.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

ChrSmith — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:22:45 GMT

F# doesn't support CLisp macros, but rather enables metaprogramming through two mechanisms.

Quotations

Quotations allow you to write F# code and by getting the quoted form of that code reason about it. You can analyze the code, for example in Expert F# quotations are used to analyze floating point operations to calculate the loss of precision. Very cool. You can also use F# quotations to dynamically create code, for example in my book I have a sample where given a mathematical function quotations are used to generate the derivative of that function symbolically.

Reflection

The other way F# can do meta programming is through reflection - dynamically loading and invoking types, inspecting attributes, etc.

These methods of 'metaprogramming' may be disappointing to some who are used to CLisp macros or even some of the mind-bending things you can do with C++ templates. However, F# is a very young language. We might be able to add more capabilities in the next release. (Post Visual Studio 2010.)

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

nome — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:35:57 GMT

Every time I look at the picture I go FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Maybe that's the intention?

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

Rick Minerich — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:44:04 GMT

Yeah, the cover kind of grosses me out to look at.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

ChrSmith — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:47:09 GMT

Totally, it really grossed me out as well... but that's why I like it. If it were like a toad or cat or something it wouldn't be memorable. You see a giant, gangly jellyfish - that thing is burned into your brain :)

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

Jon Kale — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:37:51 GMT

That's not a jellyfish. Any fool can see it's Chthulu, fresh from his aeons-long wait in R'lyeh.

I leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the editorial direction at O'Reilly...

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

Ken — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:08:11 GMT

How does F# compare to Mathematica?

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

grahamsw — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:52:56 GMT

It can sting and kill you! Enough said.

F# is a power tool - which as Jeff Alger said (of C++) can also be a great way to lose fingers. Hopefully it's one of these ones that causes ridiculously disproportionate pain. (Because that would bear a fair resemblance to my learning experience.)

I also think you win the "Scariest O'Rielly cover ever" award. Which is pretty damn awesome.

Mathematica v. F#

Ken — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:05:47 GMT

So, actually, it was a serious question: is anyone familiar with both the programming environments of F# and Mathematica and, if so, what are the comparisons that come to mind?

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

ChrSmith — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:13:17 GMT

I used Mathematica a bit in college but definitely don't consider myself an expert. From what I recall F# and Mathematica are two very different tools for solving very different problems.

Mathematica can be though of as an interactive tool for exploring mathematical-style problems, which happens to support programming. F# is a general purpose programming language, that happens to support data exploration.

While the FSI window feels in many ways like a limited Mathematica session, it doesn't support saving 'state'. That is if you introduce several values in an FSI session, you cannot save that session and load it at a later time like you can in Mathematica.

However, while you can write applications that have UIs, connect to databases, do file IO etc in Mathematica F# provides a much better experience. Both at the library level - from .NET - and at the programming language level. (Since F# was 'built' for that.)

If you want to do math / physics, stick with Mathematica. If you want to write programs, check out F#.

Does that help any?

Mathematica

Ken — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:14:15 GMT

Yes indeed it does. Many thanks!

MSMQ

Ken — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:31:34 GMT

You did so well with that question, here is another. Are there any examples of using MSMQ from F#? I am trying to get my feet wet by doing something familiar, eventually ramping up to doing new things with the language.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

ChrSmith — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:40:05 GMT

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any MSMQ + F# examples out there, but it shouldn't be difficult to write one. But porting a C# MSMQ sample to F# should be a straight forward process.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

sonorancellist — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:22:34 GMT

Those wack invertebrates will sting you! Old school!

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

Scott — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:48:07 GMT

That's *clearly* the FSM.

Flying Spaghetti or F#, you be the judge.

re: Programming F# – Official Cover

rei — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 07:48:40 GMT

I set this as my MSN picture, and my friends were perplexed as to what a musical note has to do with programming, and what programming has to do with jellyfish.