What are the benefits of using C vs F or F vs C

Question

I work for a tech company that does more prototyping than product shipment   I just got asked what s the difference between C  and F   why did MS create F  and what scenarios would it be better than C    I ve been using the language for a while now and I love it so I could easily go on about the great features of F  however I lack the experience in C  to say why we should use one over the other   What s the benefits of using C  vs F  or F  vs C

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F  is not yet-another-programming-language if you are comparing it to C   C    VB  C   C  VB are all imperative or procedural programming languages  F  is a functional programming language    Two main benefits of functional programming languages  compared to imperative languages  are 1  that they don t have side-effects  This makes mathematical reasoning about properties of your program a lot easier   2  that functions are first class citizens  You can pass functions as parameters to another functions just as easily as you can other values    Both imperative and functional programming languages have their uses  Although I have not done any serious work in F  yet  we are currently implementing a scheduling component in one of our products based on C  and are going to do an experiment by coding the same scheduler in F  as well to see if the correctness of the implementation can be validated more easily than with the C  equivalent

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F  Has Better Performance than C  in Math You could use F  projects in the same solution with C   and call from one to another  F  is really good for complex algorithmic programming  financial and scientific applications F  logically is really good for the parallel execution  it is easier to make F  code execute on parallel cores  than C

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General benefits of functional programming over imperative languages   You can formulate many problems much easier  closer to their definition and more concise in a functional programming language like F  and your code is less error-prone  immutability  more powerful type system  intuitive recurive algorithms   You can code what you mean instead of what the computer wants you to say  -  You will find many discussions like this when you google it or even search for it at SO   Special F -advantages    Asynchronous programming is extremely easy and intuitive with async   -expressions - Even with ParallelFX  the corresponding C -code is much bigger Very easy integration of compiler compilers and domain-specific languages  Extending the language as you need it  LOP Units of measure More flexible syntax Often shorter and more elegant solutions   Take a look at this document  The advantages of C  are that it s often more accurate to  imperative -applications  User-interface  imperative algorithms  than a functional programming language  that the  NET-Framework it uses is designed imperatively and that it s more widespread   Furthermore you can have F  and C  together in one solution  so you can combine the benefits of both languages and use them where they re needed

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F  is essentially the C   of functional programming languages  They kept almost everything from Objective Caml  including the really stupid parts  and threw it on top of the  NET runtime in such a way that it brings in all the bad things from  NET as well    For example  with Objective Caml you get one type of null  the option lt T   With F  you get three types of null  option lt T   Nullable lt T   and reference nulls  This means if you have an option you need to first check to see if it is  None   then you need to check if it is  Some null     F  is like the old Java clone J   just a bastardized language just to attract attention  Some people will love it  a few of those will even use it  but in the end it is still a 20-year-old language tacked onto the CLR

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One of the aspects of  NET I like the most are generics  Even if you write procedural code in F   you will still benefit from type inference  It makes writing generic code easy   In C   you write concrete code by default  and you have to put in some extra work to write generic code   In F   you write generic code by default  After spending over a year of programming in both F  and C   I find that library code I write in F  is both more concise and more generic than the code I write in C   and is therefore also more reusable  I miss many opportunities to write generic code in C   probably because I m blinded by the mandatory type annotations   There are however situations where using C  is preferable  depending on one s taste and programming style    C  does not impose an order of declaration among types  and it s not sensitive to the order in which files are compiled  C  has some implicit conversions that F  cannot afford because of type inference

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To answer your question as I understand it  Why use C    You say you re already sold on F     First off  It s not just  functional versus OO   It s  Functional OO versus OO   C  s functional features are pretty rudimentary  F  s are not  Meanwhile  F  does almost all of C  s OO features  For the most part  F  ends up as a superset of C  s functionality   However  there are a few cases where F  might not be the best choice    Interop  There are plenty of libraries that just aren t going to be too comfortable from F   Maybe they exploit certain C  OO things that F  doesn t do the same  or perhaps they rely on internals of the C  compiler  For example  Expression  While you can easily turn an F  quotation into an Expression  the result is not always exactly what C  would create  Certain libraries have a problem with this     Yes  interop is a pretty big net and can result in a bit of friction with some libraries   I consider interop to also include if you have a large existing codebase  It might not make sense to just start writing parts in F    Design tools  F  doesn t have any  Does not mean it couldn t have any  but just right now you can t whip up a WinForms app with F  codebehind  Even where it is supported  like in ASPX pages  you don t currently get IntelliSense  So  you need to carefully consider where your boundaries will be for generated code  On a really tiny project that almost exclusively uses the various designers  it might not be worth it to use F  for the  glue  or logic  On larger projects  this might become less of an issue    This isn t an intrinsic problem  Unlike the Rex M s answer  I don t see anything intrinsic about C  or F  that make them better to do a UI with lots of mutable fields  Maybe he was referring to the extra overhead of having to write  mutable  and using  lt - instead of     Also depends on the library designer used  We love using ASP NET MVC with F  for all the controllers  then a C  web project to get the ASPX designers  We mix the actual ASPX  code inline  between C  and F   depending on what we need on that page   IntelliSense versus F  types    Other tools  They might just be expecting C  only and not know how to deal with F  projects or compiled code  Also  F  s libraries don t ship as part of  NET  so you have a bit extra to ship around  But the number one issue  People  If none of your developers want to learn F   or worse  have severe difficulty comprehending certain aspects  then you re probably toast   Although  I d argue you re toast anyways in that case   Oh  and if management says no  that might be an issue    I wrote about this a while ago  Why NOT F

User · Answer

It s like asking what s the benefit of a hammer over a screwdriver  At an extremely high level  both do essentially the same thing  but at the implementation level it s important to select the optimal tool for what you re trying to accomplish  There are tasks that are difficult and time-consuming in c  but easy in f  - like trying to pound a nail with a screwdriver  You can do it  for sure - it s just not ideal   Data manipulation is one example I can personally point to where f  really shines and c  can potentially be unwieldy  On the flip side  I d say  generally speaking  complex stateful UI is easier in OO  c   than functional  f     There would probably be some people who disagree with this since it s  cool  right now to  prove  how easy it is to do anything in F   but I stand by it   There are countless others

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You re asking for a comparison between a procedural language and a functional language so I feel your question can be answered here  What is the difference between procedural programming and functional programming   As to why MS created F  the answer is simply  Creating a functional language with access to the  Net library simply expanded their market base  And seeing how the syntax is nearly identical to OCaml  it really didn t require much effort on their part

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