What are the advantages of F# over C# for enterprise application development? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What are the benefits of using C# vs F# or F# vs c#?

My team is currently using C# .NET to develop enterprise applications for our company. We have a history of Winforms dev, but are now moving over toward SilverLight.

My boss recently saw a video on F# and thought it looked pretty exciting, and he has asked me to check it out. My question is this - what advantages would a functional language (like F#) give over an OO language (like C#) in the realm of enterprise application development?

I really want to see if there are any compelling reasons to even begin contemplating a shift. Some F# and C# comparison code might be nice to see as well.

Answer 1

You can express a lot of concepts much more concisely in a functional language like F#.

Functions are first class objects, and can be applied directly to collections to perform transformations/filtering much more efficiently.

Immutability is encouraged in functional languages, and this makes (for instance) multi-threaded code much more reliable (you know data structures aren't changing under you).

By being able to write multi-threaded code more reliably and more easily it's much easier to take advantage of multiple processors/cores (increasingly important now Moore's law doesn;t apply so much).

Note that you can use your existing C# objects within F#. As such, you may want to write certain parts of your code in F# and other parts in C#. You should be able to mix and match according to your requirements and the suitability of each approach.