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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I've been using it regularly for over a year, and I love it. I could start out imperative and then code more and more in a functional style as I got to be a better functional programmer.

Having said that, I did find the transition painful. But that's going to be true of transitioning to FP no matter how you do it.

I'm still in a Windows environment, but I look forward to transitioning to Mono once I get FP down. At that point I'll be on an open, free stack, programming in a powerful language with tons of libraries and thousands of people to help if I have problems. What's there not to like?

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I have to point out that F# is licensed under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement, which isn't an approved OSI license.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/antr/vrr/vrr/l...

They had plans to change to a MS-PL (OSI approved) license but still hasn't happened after 2 years.

On a more practical side, the current license isn't bad, just obscure.

F# was just released under to OSI-approved Apache open source license.

"tons of libraries" - weren't you the one saying that stupid people don't use libraries? :-)

Gosh no, but happy you read the blog!

My point in the blog was that functional code allows you to "collect" bits of things here are there and then create your own toolset of useful stuff to do. This decreases the working set of symbols a programmer must maintain to a much more manageable level, while maximizing productivity.

It's the difference between the phonebook and having a few important people's numbers written on a piece of paper. The phone book is probably more "powerful" but the process of collecting and managing useful data from the phonebook is the important thing, not the phonebook itself.

Instead we study libraries as if they were ends to themselves. This is like trying to memorize the phone book in order to be able to call people. Yet we continue to do it.

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