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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

I can't upvote your comment enough. Learning F# w/o .NET and Clojure without JVM knowledge is next to impossible. There is no good doc despite what people say (and I own several books in this space). Scott W's F# articles are great for foundational FP, but neither that, any of the F# books, or any of the online tutorials show me how to do even simple things like iterate through a file. I'd love to see "Basic Office Programming in F#".

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For what it is worth, the Microsoft docs are getting easier to navigate. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ They are currently putting a lot of effort into docs. It's got to be hard to learn .NET from zero. Try figuring out which namespaces are the most common and start browsing the docs.

I really disagree with Microsoft's approach of homogenizing their products, and this is a perfect example.

- There's never a need for "Microsoft" documentation -- you'll have a question with a specific product or service. They really should be distinctive visually.

- This is on the microsoft domain and top left click goes to microsoft.com, but you can't get back here from microsoft.com

- By the time I click through to something (for example, .NET->F#->Get Started), I have not one but two major navbars and footer featuring prominent links and menus completely orthogonal to what I'm viewing. There is nearly zero typographical variation among the content I've expressed interest in (F#), and tons of variation for this separate content. This is distracting.

I've never had that problem with AWS and their docs are EXTENSIVE and homogeneous.

Honestly, I've always found the .NET(C#) docs pretty good even going into naming conventions and design patterns. However I'm open to improvement as they were looking a bit dated and I often had trouble ending up in docs for older versions of software/OS's.

What problems did you run into with Clojure? I haven't missed JVM/Java experience. The Clojure standard library provides nearly everything and third party Clojure libraries wrap Java libs. Off the top of my head, the only Java thing normal code sometimes references is numerics, so you might glimpse Long/MAX_VALUE or Math/sqrt.

A lot of things require you to specify the Java namespace like the "swing" demo. Iterating through a folder was similar. There are several Clojure books explaining FP concepts, but not much in the realm of here is how you do basic task "x". This isn't perfect in any language, but I've never had trouble with Perl, Python, C#, Java, Fortran...etc.

https://gist.github.com/jackmott/988b4742394cf5e7d331e31c0ee...

For starters this is enough and less confusing IMHO:

    open System.IO

    for line in File.ReadLines("/path/to/file") do
        printfn "%s" line

Or using awesome |> pipeline operator

    "/path/to/file"
    |> File.ReadLines
    |> Seq.iter (printfn "%s")

the printfn can be expanded as function, instead of partial app

    "/path/to/file"
    |> File.ReadLines
    |> Seq.iter (fun line -> printfn "%s" line)

If you could make about 50 more of these snippets...I'd be using F# everyday :)

boom http://fssnip.net/

Haha, I almost forgot about this. Thanks!

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