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Comment by shireboy | Hacker News Reader

I get he’s saying it has its place as a learning tool, but this is one reason I haven’t looked to seriously at some languages. For example, F# is a “functional language”, but as best I can tell I can do very similar with C# lambdas. To my (admittedly biased) view, F# is the extremist language and C# the middle-road.

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Reducing F# or functional programming to lambdas is a bit of a stretch. I don't know F# very well but I understand it is very close to OCaml which I know quite well. F# also has algebraic data types, match, type inference, static type checking, etc. I don't know if C# supports all this, but if it does its probably thanks to the existence of F# on the same .NET platform :).

> algebraic data types, match, type inference, static type checking

Of those, C# only has static type checking. AFAIK C# does have some limited type inference (when using LINQ), but it’s nowhere near as powerful and ubiquitous as F#, where the following is completely valid:

  let Add a b = a + b

and it will be inferred as:

  let Add (a:int) (b:int) : int = a + b

This also works in more complicated cases like when you’re accessing a property on a record, for instance.

I think the latest C# also has match (a pattern matching overload of the switch keyword).

Indeed, the middle ground depends on your perspective. In my view F# is actually the middle ground between pure functional programming and traditional OOP!

F# is much more than just C# with lambdas btw. If you want to write .net code in a functional style then F# is easily worth the time investment to learn.

When you get anything close to abstracting syntax, C# lambdas start to require more boilerplate than the concrete syntax. Any advanced functional structure is completely not available.

Just a counterexample: partial function application.

    let add x y = x + y
    let f = add 2

Boom, now `f 4` evaluates to 6. I reckon that doing the same with C# would require a lot of boilerplate.

(And I know I could have said `let f = (+) 2`, I just wanted to spell it out for those unfamiliar with F#)

Wait, I'm missing something here, because it seems that C# would be the extremist language. It even fits the pithy little saying in the article:

    Classes are awesome. What if we made a PL where everything was a class?

I mean, you can use lambdas, but last time I used C# you could still only use them inside a class definition.*

*Note: I haven't used C# in a while, do you guys have free functions yet? If so, ignore this post, my knowledge is just outdated.

Most of the time choosing a language is like a choosing the color or a trim of the same car. It is so boring.

Usually different languages Are tied to different platforms so this isn't really anagolous.

Indeed. You have to pick a 4x4 or motorbike or limousine .. often before you know where you're going.

I'd think a language tied to a platform only can be considered if you want your product to be tied to such platform.

You haven’t tried a wide variety of languages then. I have found the language chosen massively shifts what is possible to write and what is convenient to write.

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