F# is basically an OCaml clone. I wonder why it isn't called NCaml or something like that.
F# lacks some functional programming features the powerful macro system used for creating domain specific languages and extending the ocaml language.
That's a really unfortunate choice of words. It almost makes him look like he stole something in the middle of the night and never gave anyone credit.
Don Syme worked on Project 7 which brought Generics to .NET, and then spoke with Leroy and others to bring OCaml to this environment.
The next logical step was to implement an OCaml- style language directly,
and the OCaml designers were very encouraging when we talked to them
about bringing this class of languages into the .NET space. That led to the
early versions of F#.
That quote is an unfortunate choice of words! "an OCaml- style language" could be something as different as Haskell or SML, which are far more easily identified as different than OCaml. Instead he made something that looks 95% the same.
And come on, "bringing this class of languages into the .NET space" sounds far different than "porting a copy of a language to .NET that's 95% the same."
No, he didn't steal something in the middle of the night without giving credit, but that quote is still pretty disingenuous sounding. It's more like he copied OCaml and then only gave credit for using a similar style.
Well, you are just piling on more unfortunate choices of words. You are accusing him of dishonesty ("then only gave credit"), and laziness; your "95% the same" comment implies that you think of a language only at the syntax level.
That "5%" of F# that you imply is different from OCaml involved redoing the entire .NET framework, getting generics into it.
For example, look at the early papers (from 2001) on "ILX: Extending the .NET Common IL for Functional Language Interoperability", they considered Haskell, OCaml and ML. The compiler was written in Haskell. Or "Transposing F to C#: Expressivity of parametric polymorphism in an object-oriented language".
> Well, you are just piling on more unfortunate choices of words.
And you are continuing to bend over backwards to misconstrue what I've said. I don't know why you're being this obtuse.
> You are accusing him of dishonesty ("then only gave credit"), and laziness
Not quite...I'm sure he's been open about what he did. Your own quote said, "to implement an OCaml- style language" when what he did seemed like a lot more than just that. What I am saying is that people who say it's just in the style of OCaml aren't accurately describing it. And I never said it wasn't a lot of work, or that it indicated laziness.
> your "95% the same" comment implies that you think of a language only at the syntax level.
Fine, if you want to believe that it doesn't bother me. But you sure are continuing to put a lot of words in my mouth here.
> That "5%" of F# that you imply is different from OCaml involved redoing the entire .NET framework, getting generics into it.
I wasn't talking about that and I never said there wasn't a lot of work there. That really has no bearing on how similar F# looks to OCaml. This has to be some blatant logical fallacy, like you moving the goalposts to now include this part, too.
It's been a week and you're clearly not interested in any discussion. Just moveon.org.
F# is pretty much Microsoft's version of OCaml, but it diverges in some key features (for instance, it can do multicore but it does not have OCaml's functors).
F# has added some new features on top of OCaml like:
- Lightweight syntax
- Active Patterns to extend pattern matching
- Type Providers to make it easy to interact with json/sql in a type safe way
F#'s features don't feel that useful after working in OCaml though. I've tried it for various projects, but OCaml is honestly just as good in all those situations. I wonder if there's some specific type of project where F#'s features will really shine.
Yeah, I get that those are useful, but things like type providers or units of measure feel pretty useless to me and I'm not really sure if they're supposed to make me want to switch to F# or not. They certainly don't fill the place of OCaml's module system or object system or GADTs, PPXes, polymorphic variants, etc. To me OCaml's abstractions feel much more polished/as if they were all invented to fill some existing hole in the language and work together (rather than some random "cherry on top" feature that doesn't fix anything for me and is rarely useful).
Tooling is definitely far from mature. It's treated as a second class language in .NET, and on top Linux is treated a second class OS.
I just tried to start a project with F# and ended up abandoning, and am looking into Rust right now. I considered OCaml but its lack of multicore support and the ecosystem situation made me drop it.
My point was that even as second class citizen on .NET, F# has more tooling and available libraries than OCaml ever will on Windows.
For a long time OPAM did not support Windows, and right now cygwin or Linux subsystem still seem to be better ways than straight Win32 application support.
OCaml is quite nice on *NIX systems, on other kind of OSes not so much.
Of course it feels less native than with F#, but we have created and used CSML (https://github.com/LexiFi/csml) specifically to allow our OCaml code base to interact with .NET.
