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?
What do you think is the main hindering of larger adaption of F# (or functional in general)?
I think that F# (and FP in general) is simpler than C# (and OOP in general), but not easier. This has several implications:
For small problems, it's easier for the typical developer to get stuff done using OOP/procedural logic (e.g. for loops instead of Seq.fold), at the cost of a slightly higher bug rate.
For large problems, the complexity of OOP bogs things down because it becomes difficult to reason about behavior (e.g. mutable variables), while FP scales up more linearly (e.g. no side-effects).
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.
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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.