Things I Like About F Sharp

Things I Like About F Sharp

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Programming in F# is a pure joy. I go home happy, feeling like I've got more done than I really should have.

Type inference!!

The .NET Libraries are excellent - they make F# much more powerful than it seems at first

The Set, Map and Hashtbl modules are really useful

The VisualStudio mode is incredible - people come into my office and see me programming in a "functional" language with pop-up hints, on-the-fly-typechecking and all that and can't quite believe it.

When using VisualStudio I finish typing in my program and get to the point where I would normally start typechecking it. But the on-the-fly type checking has meant that I've already removed all the type errors! So it just typechecks perfectly. And because it's a strongly typed language without much in the way of nulls etc the resulting program often runs correctly first time.

When using VisualStudio the debugging support is awesome

I can use the CLRProfiler to profile the space usage of my program. What an amazing tool! And it's a free download!

OperatorOverloading on the primitive types makes some kinds of programming much less cluttered

The compiler is fast and robust

I'm surprised at the performance I get from F#. For many examples it seems to beat C#, I think because F# inlines more agressively.