Impressed

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/28/12 10:04 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> 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.

It was for Basic :o). Anyhow, indeed, the tools around it make F# pretty 
cool (just not all that original as a language).

Andrei