Impressed

[Paulo Pinto]

On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 16:07:14 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> 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

Sure, as I said it is all about having Microsoft's weight on it.