Impressed

[Paulo Pinto]

On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 12:42:47 UTC, Stuart wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 09:37:47 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>
>> I tend to favour F# instead of OCaml due to three things
>
> I've never really seen the point of F#. Aside from maths, what 
> is F# good for that a standard imperative language is not? 
> Especially when you consider that all flavours of .NET have 
> native support for LINQ.

Let me see:

- Symbolic code manipulation;
- Metaprogramming;
- Easy parallelization of code thanks to immutable data 
structures and workflows
- Type providers (comming in F# 3.0) to manipulate remote data as 
language data types
- The right way of doing type inference (shared by all ML 
languages)
- Asynchronous programming builtin without having to wait for 
.NET 4.5
- Algebraic data types

Microsoft wouldn't have brought F# into Visual Studio if it 
wasn't worth it, Microsoft is a business, not a language charity 
company.