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Aaron's Technology Musings

Who let this guy on the podium?

Functional Programming is Hard

I am in deep learn mode with F# - as in, going through Syme's Expert F# book and doing everything I can to understand it.  As in, rather than doing my normal skimming of material, read it in detail, and "code along" with the examples.

My first thoughts are that learning F#, as someone who has been doing Imperative Programming of one type or another in my career, is harder than any transition I have done before (procedural-->OOP, C++-->Java-->C#).  That said, I definitely have come to the conclusion that learning functional programming (be it through F#, Haskell, OCaml, or any other functional language) - is a great learning exercise.  I look forward to every time I crack a new chapter and learn some new trick in F#.

Worry not dear friends - you will soon start to see some F# examples and explanations, especially from the perspective of a C# developer, come to this very blog.
 

Published Friday, January 18, 2008 12:48 PM by Anonymous

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Comments

# re: Functional Programming is Hard @ Friday, January 18, 2008 1:39 PM

If you're completely new to functional programming then "Expert F#" is almost certainly not the right book for you precisely because it is aimed at experts. I would recommend Robert Pickering's "Foundations of F#" or our F#.NET Journal for a gentler introduction.

I migrated from C++ to OCaml about 5 years ago now and I must say that I found ML-style functional programming much easier to learn than OOP.

Jon Harrop

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