Is F Sharp the right programming language for what I want to accomplish?

Question

I recently downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and would like to know if this multi-paradigm programming language is the right language for what I what I want to accomplish.. I don't have any experience with OOP, rather I'm an ole school procedural language programmer. I also downloaded an eval version of RADvolution Designer. My goal is to convert a char-based app I designed/developed 20 years ago with INFORMIX-SQL to a GUI front end with an SQL engine.

If you have time, please visit www.frankcomputer.com to view a video-demo of the app. CAVEAT: The website and video is in Spanish, but you can use Google translate to get a more-or-less idea of what my app does. At the video's 2 minute mark, you can get a better feel for the functionality. If you need further explanation, I will be happy to explain.

REOPEN THIS QUESTION!.. I've seen worse questions than this one remain open. there seems to be a biased double standard when it comes to deciding whose questions get closed and which ones aren't!

Answer 1

Define "worth learning".

If you are or want to be a good software engineer, you should probably learn as many paradigms as you can, and if you are coming from a .NET background, then F# is a good way to learn functional programming. However, there are a lot of other languages that are functional - Haskell, Lisp, and Scheme come to mind. Learning different paradigms will help you think about problems differently and come up with better solutions.

However, just because it's new and different doesn't mean that you should run out and play with it. It sounds like you have a particular problem that you are trying to solve. You should sit down with your requirements and take a look at what features F# has to see what it can buy you. Maybe it'll make solving some of your problems easy, maybe it won't. A good thing about F#, though, is that it plays nice with the other .NET languages like C# and VB.NET - even if F# can't solve all your problems, it might be possible to use F# to solve some of your problem and other .NET tools to solve others.

In the end, though, it's all about delivering a high-quality product to the customer or end user on time and budget. That might mean learning a new technology or it might mean going with the tried and true that you know.

A problem that I see right now, though, is that if you are getting paid to solve this problem, then it might not be the best time to learn something new. You probably aren't getting paid to spent time to learn a new language - you are getting paid to design and implement a solution. If that's the case, keep F# in the back of your head for when you do have time to learn it - see my first point about learning new paradigms.

Answer 2

"char-based app I designed/developed 20 years ago with INFORMIX-SQL to a GUI front end with an SQL engine."

Sounds like CRUD, which means C# to me. If you have mathematical analysis aspects, those may well fit F# well; you should be able to plug in F# pretty easy in VS 2010 I believe.