hubFS: THE place for F#

Today i mentioned to a colleague that I'm doing some functional programming in my spare time.

His response was "Functional programming - isn't that the long haired, dope smoking end of computing?"

Is he right?

(Me, I started losing my hair twenty years ago.. I'm on a number 1 1/2 razor.. I try to be normal, but have sometimes been accused of being eccentric).

I'd say they are not normal (I do not yet count myself as a functional programmer. I have some hurdles to get over. Lamda Expressions mostly).

If normal is:

- Writing lots of boilerplate
- Wasting time with pointers and memory (as much as I love them)
- Pulling your hair out tracking down null pointers
- Writing helper function after helper function so your functions are not 3 or 4 computer screens long and 2 computer screens wide because of the nested structures
- Creating some complicated structure and iterator when a simple list would suffice (car and cdr anyone?)

Then no, I suppose they are not "normal".

Time to get back to that wonderful thing called C++ ...

Good answer, Brennan! +5 Insighful.

What are you using to learn F#? I've had a look at a few resources, and at the moment I'm using the O'Reilly ebook http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/. I like that it is very detailed, and explains things in context of programming concepts, not just a simple "how to".

- from a C++ refugee