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Today’s random F# code: Using measures to give types more meaning

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We use NodaTime in our application to deal with time. As you may remember, time is very important in our application – it’s a attendance time-tracking tool with duty planning and many more features. For example, we use Instant to model a point in time. But sometimes, we need a point in time with a granularity of minutes, not nanoseconds. Instead of introducing our own type to model an instant with minute granularity, we use an Instant with a measure. Let’s see how this works:

Myths about F#: F# is hard to learn! No, it’s just different than C#.

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A typical conversion: Me: “Did you take a look at F#?”Paul*: “No, it’s just too hard to learn!”Me: “Why?”Paul: “I don’t understand anything because of the syntax.” *Paul = Person assuming unyielding learning F# isn’t hard to learn. But you probably have to learn four concepts that you may never have seen before** **unless you have experience in other functional programming languages Let’s see these concepts and how you can...

Myths about F#: We can’t use F# because we can’t rewrite everything from C#! You don’t have to, use Interop.

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Most code running on .Net is written in C#. So when you consider writing some code in F#, you probably already have a good amount of C# code. C# code you want to keep. It probably doesn’t make economic sense to port C# code to F#.

The good news is that you can start using F# anyway. F# and C# have excellent interoperability.

Myths about F#: We tried FP in C#, and it’s unreadable! Yes, but that’s where F# shines.

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Just today, I read on a social media platform that the author doesn’t like that most programming languages incorporate more and more functional features. The post was accompanied by a short example of pattern matching in C# using some of the features introduced in the latest updates. More generally, I hear and read repeatedly from people that tried to write code in a more functional programming style in C# but weren’t happy with the resulting code. The code was just too hard to read...

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