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I’ve been writing a lot of (production) F# since my last post on this topic and while I don’t consider myself an expert (by any means!) I’ve certainly become a lot more familiar with the language and have found myself falling into what Isaac Abraham refers to as “the pit of success”.
It was hard to understand, or at least appreciate, what he meant by this on my first pass through his book (which I recommend by the way – that really helped get me on my way) and I think that’s because F# doesn’t lead you towards success (i.e. bug free code) through any one language feature – but rather how all its features interlock and go together.
It really came together for me when I undertook a significant refactoring of some code and when I had finished and pressed build and it compiled without errors and warnings I realised that I knew what I’d done worked. I didn’t have to test it or try it. I knew it had to work (and there’s no twist in this tale – it did).
Amongst other things I had no mutable state, I’d used single case case discriminated unions to protect against mis-assignments, I’d used the type system to protect against bad data, I’d used the Seq functions almost exclusively to work on collections, I’d favoured matching over if/then/else constructs and had no missing matches, I’d used modules and namespaces to organise my code, and I had no nulls!
In fact as this application comes together, its a mobile app that I am building with the Fabulous framework – and the Model->View->Update architecture is perfect for a functional language, the only thing I really find myself worrying about is does the UI layout correctly.
It’s been a fascinating, and very positive, experience for someone who has been working with C# and JavaScript for so many years. I’d sum it up as this:
F# makes me work a little harder to express concepts in code but once I have I am more confident the result is correct and far less brittle and as a result I am more productive.
It’s not that C# “forces” you to write brittle code – but it makes it far easier to and so in some ways, putting the paradigms to one side and focusing on the un-brittleness of code (and as someone who has used all three languages), I am starting to think of F# being to C# as C# is to C++.
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