F# on linux, no prior .NET experience

Question

Since Semptember I've been playing with Clojure, a functional lisp language on the JVM. I used it in a couple of small hobby projects. The language is very concise, simple, but I came to a conclusion that s-expressions are not really for me.

There are other functional languages out there like Scala, Haskell, OCaml, etc, but they seem to be more of academic languages.

As of late I am considering learning F# in my spare time. I got a couple of questions:

• I am primarily a linux user. I am worried that Mono may be lagging behind.
• I am doing mostly web-dev in a dynamic language which I am pleased with. I'd use F# for some hobby GUI apps, or simple games. Is there good support for both? Can Mono/F# be used for instance on Iphone or Android devices?

When I was learning Clojure I had little Java experience. This didn't turn out to be a big problem. The Java interop was very easy, and Java as a language is also pretty straightforward, so I had no issues reading up documentation.

• Is F#'s interop easy enough, and does the lack of .NET/C# knowledge pose a difficulty in using external libraries?
• Lastly, which resources/books would be adequate for me to learn F# (some functional experience, none .NET/C#)

Thanks

Answer 1

There has been a lot of progress on getting F# to work well on Mac and Linux:

• In November 2010, the F# team announced an open-source (Apache) release of F# source code. The Mono team is planing to integrate it in the next version of Mono (see Miguel de Icaza's blog).

• Folks from Mono already started working on the integration and they have a version with Mono-style Makefiles, which you can get & build from Github. If you don't want to build F# yourself, you can also use community-created Max/Linux package available here.

• I created an F# integration for MonoDevelop which gives you pretty good user experience (including tool tips with type information, background type checking and completion).

Regarding interop - F# works pretty well on Mono and should, in principle, run anywhere where Mono works (I would expect Android should work, but I didn't try it). It won't work on iPhone (even though C# works), because there are quite a few limitations in that version of Mono.

Answer 2

Mono is good enough if you're not trying to ride on the bleeding edge of the hype wave. F# works well with it.

The .NET interop with C-like APIs, using PInvoke, is not difficult to use. It takes some time if you're binding a huge API, tough.

I believe Mono has some iPhone support and don't know about Android support. But I don't work with mobile programming, so, take this with a grain of salt.

For books my personal favorite is F# for Scientists by Jon Harrop. It covers enough material to be interesting even if you're not into scientific computing and it's extremely well written.