As a side-note, if you want to get into functional programming but don't want to make the full leap into "PURE EVERYTHING MUST STAY CLEAN DONT BREAK THE RULES" world of Haskell, F# is another excellent choice for a beginner functional lang. You can program in either OOP or functional style, letting you take your time with the transition.
Also, if you don't want to make the full leap into "PURE EVERYTHING MUST STAY CLEAN DONT BREAK THE RULES" style code, try Haskell. Imperative programming in Haskell is great! The language evaluation rules may be purely function, but your code doesn't need to be.
> Also, if you don't want to make the full leap into "PURE EVERYTHING MUST STAY CLEAN DONT BREAK THE RULES" style code, try Haskell. Imperative programming in Haskell is great! The language evaluation rules may be purely function, but your code doesn't need to be.
with which you seem to be agreeing. Perhaps it refers to the grandparent post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537877), specifically to its implicit claim that Haskell programming involves "PURE EVERYTHING MUST STAY CLEAN DONT BREAK THE RULES"?
Do you know any good guides to getting started with SML, as LYAH and similar allow one to do with Haskell? Also, can you recommend any particular implementation?
Since I learned Haskell and it became my first language years ago, I was used to not be surprised by other language features. The "Haskell does it better" syndrome.
Anyway, I needed to do a small .NET work two years ago. I choose to try F#. It was the first and only time I got highly please by another language features. Actually, I've to admit that I was pissed of : F# may well be a better language than Haskell.
I'm sorry for my ignorance, but there's something about type providers I just can't wrap my head around.
It seems like the primary purpose of using a typed provider is so that the types (classes) can dynamically change during runtime (for example, you get different table objects for the different connection strings you pass in). But how do you program a client against an API that can change at will? Is your client code just basically doing runtime reflection on the data the type provider returns?
As far as I can tell, Type Providers are just a slicker way of having external codegen tools. So instead of "SoapToVBCode.exe" you have it wrapped up in a type provider and can just do "type MySoap = SoapProvider<http://wsdl>".
It seems like a useful feature but far from the power of having full macros.
Have you ever noticed that in every post about fp languages there is always a mention about using f#. I've never seen any language-advertisements at this level.
Have you ever noticed that in every post about fp languages there is always a mention about using Haskell. I've never seen any language-advertisements at this level.
I also toot F#'s horn because it has an amazing resource for learning how to use functional style in your programs: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/site-contents/
A few pages on that site did more for me regarding functional programming than the entirety of LYAH did, and it also has a very nice monad tutorial: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/computation-expressio...