Different languages have some little things that make the life easier: for devs, their QAs and customers. The app is fast and behaves correctly, the code looks simple and understandable - everyone is happy.

Here are the slides and a couple of code samples from my talk “[F#] Dev Life’s Little Pleasures”. Briefly, it takes some real-world problems 1 and provides the simple solutions.

Captain Kitteh - Mutability

  1. Units of Measure - need to admit, I was a long time sceptic (c’mon, how can you get kg and m^2 mixed up?)… until was given a spreadsheet with a “correct formula”, but its result didn’t make sense at all.

  2. Generic Restrictions - one of my favourite features! A lot of people don’t even know about it. That’s unfair. The most complex example I could think of - a static member with out-parameter) is included. But as always - use with care, it might become quite cryptic.

  3. Immutability as a default - mostly for the devs with C# or similar background. Great to be sure the things won’t change.

  4. Nulls and Options - the classic.

  5. Discriminated Unions and Pattern-Matching - invalid states shouldn’t have a possibility to appear (and yes, sometimes it’s better to forget about the underscores).

Let the compiler help you!

  1. simplified a bit [return]