[nycbug-talk] instructions for building f# on freebsd

[Siraaj Khandkar]

On May 17, 2013, at 10:09 AM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>>> 
>> I am new to F# - is there a good tutorial and/or good usecase of when I
>> would want to use F#?  It looks like it is built on top of Microsoft's .NET
>> CLR - is that a good thing?
>> 
>> 
> I'll try to answer objectively. I've never written F# personally. I've
> written a lot of CLR code in C# and powershell, and when forced at gunpoint
> VB.NET. I don't have a suggestion for a tutorial. As far as when you want
> to use it, its an extension of OCAML, and there is an option to compile
> pure OCAML code. Its a really good language for implementing algotithims.
> Its not good for "plumbing code."

There's no reason to make that distinction, if you like the language you'll
use it for whatever, if not - you'll avoid it. I happily write plumbing code
in OCaml.


> So as an example, if you were writing a
> daytrading system in the CLR, you code to talk to the bloomberg terminal,
> and talk to the system that executes the trade should be in C#. The code
> that's taking your data from your bloomberg terminal and doing all kinds of
> crazy math to determine when and what to buy and sell should be in F#.

Are you making that distinction based on availability of 3rd party libs?
Because if so - I'm pretty sure one can easily call other .NET code from F#.


> F# is apache licensed[1] and bundled in mono. I've never seen an instance
> of Microsoft harming an open source .NET project via copyright or patent
> claims. Miguel, the head of mono has a commercial  business that produces
> Visual Studio plugins to let you develope in the CLR and deploy on android
> and iphone[2]. Microsoft hosted the 2010 monospace conference in the NERD
> center in MIT (where I happened to speak about Mongodb). So in a very
> pragmatic sense, as a person who produces and consumes lots of open source
> code that compiles to the CLR, Its not a bad thing IMHO.
> 
> Footnotes:
> 1.
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2010/11/04/announcing-the-f-compiler-library-source-code-drop.aspx
> 2. http://xamarin.com/
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-- 
Siraaj Khandkar
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