Skip to main content

F# eye for the C# guy

Image
By
On Tuesday night I drove to Cambridge to see F# eye for the C# guy given by Phil Trelford at Software East. I’ve always been intrigued by functional programming languages, but never really taken the plunge. I’ve worked with C# on a couple of contracts in the past, so thought this would be a great introduction. And it was.

Phil Trelford has a very unique and charismatic presenting style that would have made the material interesting even if it had been boring, which it wasn’t.  There were a few slides and then some code. I like code! The initial example was a demonstration of how you can reduce a 30+ line, simple C# class down to only half a dozen lines of F#. That was a nice opener and there were plenty more examples like that. F# is certainly a very concise language and therefore has a slight edge in terms of power over C#.

Was I inspired to install an F# compiler and get hacking? Honestly? Not in the slightest. It’s a horribly ugly language and not as expressive as I think it could be. I was inspired to think a bit more about Clojure and Scala though.

Comments

  1. Phil Nash18 May 2012 at 10:17

    Would be interested to hear why you think it is a "horribly ugly language and not as expressive as I think it could be".
    Anything in particular that makes you feel that way?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul Grenyer18 May 2012 at 10:21

    I didn't find it aesthetically pleasing! It'ss expressive, in the same way LINQ is, in that you have to know what the operators mean and that I think is the hurdle I don't want to bother jumping yet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Phil Nash18 May 2012 at 10:25

    Interesting.
    Thanks for clarifying

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous28 May 2012 at 16:21

    You can't possibly claim that scala code is more aesthetically pleasing than F#. Clojure is cleaner for sure.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Paul Grenyer28 May 2012 at 16:23

    I didn't say F# was more aesthetically pleasing thank scala. It was an absolute statement, not a relitive one.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more