Throughout this long learning process of building and rebuilding a program, there have been a few consistent points that I’d trip over when using F#. Some were more noticeable at the beginning and others only became irritating after repeated use. Coming from C++ I’m used to avoiding language features that are more trouble than they are worth, so I was hoping the F# didn’t have as many or as nasty ‘gotcha’ moments.
This is the next step in my journey with F# in writing a small application. I decided to undo most of the reactive extensions work and get back to using simple functions wherever possible. I had let the project sit for long enough again to come back to it with fresh eyes. I saw where I could have made the FRP code more manageable by using bigger blocks in the data stream, but I was already committed to nearly start from scratch and apply everything that I had learned since I started in the hopes of having a complete solution from a single philosophy.
Learning F# as part of a real project is more than just the application code, it’s everything that’s involved with building up the system requirements to deploying updates. At this point in my adventure my attempts at working FRP into the solution weren’t proving fruitful, so I found it easier to focus on the rest of the ecosystem and other aspects of the solution. Testing There was an upside to creating a system that didn’t work; to discover why it didn’t work I needed a much more powerful testing framework than before.
This is continuation of my previous journal on working with F# in comparison to an existing C++ program and supporting Python systems. It ended on a still-prototype level system that was heavily OO, but used some of F#’s nicer type and syntax features to cut down boilerplate and organizational complexity. F# was easy enough to learn and use, but I was looking to push the system from a prototype to something more polished.
I’ve previously mentioned a passing interest in F# because it was sufficiently different from languages I knew and had many concepts that sounded immediately useful. It took me almost 2 years to take the plunge and implement a non-trivial app in F#. It took 3 tries to get something that felt usable and idiomatic. This the first part of my journal of lessons learned. Starting out I didn’t buy any books or take any classes, but I did read every bit of literature online before writing anything at all.