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Comment by Eji1700 | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting. I'm a huge fan of F# and think anything working in that hybridish space is the way to go. I'll have to dedicate some more time to this when I get a moment.

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I've been on the F# website for 5 minutes now looking through damn near every page and I cannot find a single page that shows me a simple example program or the syntax at all.

Everything is hidden behind some kind of "let's get started!" wizard. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/languages/fsharp-he...

Here's a decent tour: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fsharp/

this website is great - should truthfully be 50% of the index.html of every language project ever.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/what-is-fsha...

Here's a non-wizard tutorial that I bookmarked when I started with F# (I also had a hard time finding a simple example at first):

https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/get-st...

What I like about this page is that it shows a basic project structure.

Oh yeah. A key hindrance of F# is that MS treats it like a side project even though it's probably their secret weapon, and a lot of the adopters are dotnet coders who already know the basics so the on-boarding is less than ideal.

https://fsharp.org/ is the best place to actually start, although i'm guessing you did and went to the hello world which leads back to ms's nightmares.

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ is the standard recommendation from there but there's finally some good youtube and other content out there.

They have a browser repl as well https://try.fsharp.org/

agreed, a "learn dotnet via f#" approach for people with experience in other ML languages would be excellent.

fsharp.org is actually the offender. lots of links to basically nothing and quite a few of them are a dead end 404.

> hybridish space

I'm sorry, but what do you mean by that? Roc is "as" pure as Haskell (or Koka), if that's your point.

I glanced at the example code and it looked like it allowed side effects, but maybe I was wrong. I haven't had much time to mess with it and seemed to be able to hard crash the repl doing some testing so it's something i'll have to look at later.

Well, yes, if there are no type annotations because all types are inferred, you don't see the effect "types".

https://www.roc-lang.org/tutorial#tasks

Then to my limited understanding that's less "pure" than haskell isn't it, which doesn't allow side effects and thus forces monads?

Honestly it looks like basically the same as getline/putStrLen from the tutorial(1) in the link below, just not written in an intentionally obtuse language.

Considering how much more approachable this Roc documentation/naming is, I'm wondering if it isn't so that the people writing Wikipedia's math pages are probably the same people that are drawn to and writes Haskell/monad "tutorials".

1: http://learnyouahaskell.com/input-and-output

Roc doesn't allow side effects. All effects are wrapped and returned from a function. So this is just as pure as haskell. Though it may not be exposed in the same way as haskell, effects still boil down to something akin to monads and callbacks.

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