IT tasks: F# script vs Powershell script [closed]

Question

I know that Powershell is generally considered the IT management language for windows, but why/when would you choose F# instead, which is strongly typed and 'intellisensed' ?

Answer 1

I'd choose F# when it was a better fit for the company I was working for, the team who'll be using it, and the task at hand. Otherwise I'd choose something else.

I can't be more specific than that without more details, but I can suggest a few questions you should ask:

1. What is the problem you're solving?
2. In which language is it easier to express the solution to the problem?
3. Are existing staff F# developers themselves (i.e. consider the learning curve involved)?
4. Will the people maintaining this code be administrators (who are usually quite familiar with Powershell, & not at all familiar with F#)?

A related hint: don't allow a profusion of languages to develop in your production code and infrastructure.

By all means experiment to find the best language to solve the problem you're having, but if you find in five years time that someone has written a core component of your solution in a language that is no longer understood by anyone in the company, you may have a serious problem on your hands.

My personal rule of thumb (of course there are exceptions) is that a project should have a core language and a scripting language to hold it all together, & that those languages should be chosen first to fit the problem domain, and secondly to maximise proficiency across the team. 'Pet languages' should be strongly discouraged in production code or infrastructure.

Answer 2

It depends on your problem and on who will maintain the scripts.

PowerShell is very strong in administration areas (working with files, active directory, csv/xml, computers, etc.), but it's programming abilities are quite limited (e.g. case of generics). Threading in PowerShell is not as easy as it could be. But nobody expects from administrators that they will use threads. Instead there are background jobs that satifisfy administrator's needs.

On the other hand, F# is real programming language, which means it is quite low level and therefore verbose (compared to PowerShell). Some tasks written in PowerShell are one-liners, whereas in F# you would write a lot of code. Besides that - how would you achieve running command on remote computers (Invoke-Command -computer myserver ...)?

As you see, it depends on your problem.
Very important is also who will maintain the scripts. You might be on holiday and your colleagues will need to edit the scripts. Both languages need some time to learn. IMHO it is easier to learn PowerShell; thinking in functional style needs to bend your head.