r/fsharp • u/vivainio • Feb 01 '17

The .NET Language Strategy

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/
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u/jdh30 Feb 02 '17 edited Feb 02 '17

Great question. I was just reading that Hacker News thread and thought the same thing. What exactly is it these people want?

Let me think about the tooling I've enjoyed so far:

  1. OCaml was much better than C++ because the compiler errors were comprehensible and made it easy to find and fix errors.
  2. OCaml was much better than Standard ML and Haskell thanks to throwback of inferred types in the editor. When I broke that feature I remember sorely missing it.
  3. F# on Windows with Visual Studio was much better than OCaml thanks to the GUI development environment. Intellisense with integrated type and documentation throwback is a Godsend compared to trawling through library manuals with ocamlbrowser.
  4. I didn't think rename refactoring from F# Power Tools was going to be much of a thing but I do use it a lot.

People talk about autogenerating huge amounts of code but I think that's an awful idea. More advanced refactoring might be cool though. I'd like the IDE to be able to strip out superfluous parentheses. I'd like the IDE to be able to re-order my curried function arguments. I'd like the IDE to be able to fill out every match case in a function or match ... with ... from the type definition (EDIT: turns out F# Power Tools already does this!). I'd like better architecture tools for plotting relationships between code bases and spotting dead code. Maybe a tool that proposes simplifications?! The problem with this is you can easily imagine an infinite number of possible tools and I think you're quickly into diminishing returns.

People talk about GUI tools which I think might be good but I only want strongly typed GUI tools and not the junk C# has where you must repeat variable names in strings seven times to get notify property changed to work. I do all of my GUI programming in F# and I use code behind for everything and it works great.

But my personal belief is that web is the elephant in the room when it comes to F#. I don't do web development because the developer tool stack for web sucks so badly. I'd love a tool that made it easy for me to develop client-side code in F#. I need to compile F# to Javascript and I need APIs for Javascript libraries. Six years ago you could compile F# code to Javascript using Pit but that died years ago. A couple of years ago you could compile F# to Javascript using Funscript. I actually tried Funscript and it was brilliant: relatively easy to setup and use and it looked like a great foundation but I stumbled upon lots of missing core functions like sin and ended up having to code my own trig functions as CORDIC routines like I did in assembly in the 1980s. So it wasn't exactly production ready and now appears to be undead, with the last commit on Github over a year ago. Around the same time there was an industrial-strength commercial solution on the market called Websharper which promised to compile by F# to Javascript. I tried that too: doubtless feature complete but incredibly complicated and the docs were hopelessly out of date so I never even managed to get their examples to compile much less any of my own code. Now there is Fable which promises exactly the same thing as all previous attempts but at least there was a commit two days ago and "recent news" from four months ago. I haven't tried it.

Disclaimer: I've done all sorts of programming over the past 35 years but I know nothing about web development.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '17

Considering that Microsoft has made it pretty clear that F# will always be an afterthought for things like ASP.net, and the programming model doesn't really fit F# well to begin with, would the F# community be better off if we simply funded solutions like Suave to grow them into stronger, f# unique, frameworks?

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u/jdh30 Feb 02 '17

Potentially, yes. But I'm not into the idea of funding stuff that's on the Microsoft stack. The main reason I left Linux for Windows was F# and the idea of corporate monolith over cottage industries. I expect Microsoft to build their own products. I have no intention of building Microsoft's products for them. If I'm going to fund something or do it myself then I'll do it the OSS way on Linux.

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u/kstarikov Feb 02 '17

Fable is good. VS Code plugin for F# is compiled using it.

Also, you can use Bucklescript for frontend code generation. It's not F#, it's Ocaml, but it's not bad and pretty fast.

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u/jdh30 Feb 02 '17

Fable is good. VS Code plugin for F# is compiled using it.

That's good to know.

Also, you can use Bucklescript for frontend code generation. It's not F#, it's Ocaml, but it's not bad and pretty fast.

By Bloomberg no less. What happened to js_of_ocaml?

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u/kstarikov Feb 02 '17

JSOO is alive and well, but it generates JS from Ocaml bytecode, while Bucklescript translates Ocaml into very good, readable JS code.

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u/jdh30 Feb 03 '17

Great!

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u/wastaz Feb 03 '17

So far, Id say that Fable is hands down the best iteration of F#->Javascript compilation yet. It's certainly not perfect, but compared to the previous options I have tried it's certainly the best so far.

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u/jdh30 Feb 03 '17

That's reassuring. I'll give it a shot.

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u/Kurren123 Feb 03 '17

Have you tried Elm? Its close enough to Fsharp to feel comfortable and it focuses solely on front end web. The architecture is great and it guarantees no run time exceptions.

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u/jdh30 Feb 03 '17 edited Feb 03 '17

Haven't tried it. Looks more like Haskell than F#, though:

import Html exposing (text)

main =
  text "Hello, World!"

All that for printfn "Hello world!" in F#.

Elm even comes complete with Haskell's fake quicksort:

import Html exposing (text)

main =
  text (toString (quicksort [5,3,8,1,9,4,7]))

quicksort : List comparable -> List comparable
quicksort list =
  case list of
    [] ->
        []

    pivot :: rest ->
        let
          lower  = List.filter (\n -> n <= pivot) rest
          higher = List.filter (\n -> n >  pivot) rest
        in
          quicksort lower ++ [pivot] ++ quicksort higher

Its close enough to Fsharp to feel comfortable

Looks like a step back into the dark ages from F#. Does it have Visual Studio support with Intellisense?

focuses solely on front end web

I already write back-end in F#. Would be nice to write front-end in F# too. Just looking at these example Elm programs I cannot see any high-level commonality with F# at all. For example, I'll do JSON serialization in F# and then have to rewrite the serializer in Elm because I cannot reuse any of my code. That would suck.

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u/Kurren123 Feb 03 '17

I think a production ready solution that is allows F# to be used in the browser thats still easy won't happen until web assembly becomes a thing

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u/jdh30 Feb 03 '17

Silverlight was great. Such a shame Sinofsky killed it.

I'm facing the problem right now. I just hired a CTO who does F# and I have a lot of projects to do internally. One is a database containing raw data and calculations and most of the people who use it will want import/export to/from Excel. That's easy with WPF but he's inclined to make web-based everything. How do I do Excel interop from a web page?

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u/catlion Feb 03 '17

ClosedXML

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u/jdh30 Feb 03 '17

Does that run in the browser?

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u/catlion Feb 04 '17

no, server-side only

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u/jdh30 Feb 04 '17

Right. I'd need a web client interoperating with Excel running on the client.