User Groups and F#

For a while I have been threatening to try a user group. Well this week I went to my first meeting.

The user group I went to is called Leeds Sharp who are celebrating their third birthday, happy birthday guys and thanks for the cake.

The talk was all about F#. I know nothing about F# other than it is in visual studio. The speaker was Phil Trelford an expert in F# and former game developer who regularly speaks at conferences. Phil is an expert programmer, one of his stories was that while he had a broken arm, he wrote a copy of Excel in F#. Even with two hands I wouldn’t know where to start on something like that.

There are plenty of advantages to using F# over C#, fewer lines of code was one. In Phil’s example he had some C# code which was about 30 lines but the F# was 2, part of the reason for this is F# has no {}.

I found myself thinking this must be too good to be true there must be some disadvantages to using F#?

I don’t know what they are yet, I am guessing you need to play around with the language a bit to really understand them.

One claim that was made was that F# has less bugs. I am unsure how this can be true. Code is written by humans, humans will make mistakes which ever language they choose, there will be bugs.

After the group I came away with a few things to try out. Try the F# tutorial that can be found in Visual Studio, try a Koan, this is a piece of code that contains failing tests, in the process of fixing the tests you learn the language, come back next time to Leeds Sharp and learn something else.