the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp VS interactive

Take a book that is project-based, such as The Ray Tracer Challenge, no matter what language it uses in the book, and start going through the book in F#. I have done so, for example, here is my in-work F# implementation for the ray tracer book.

Yes, please do! Warning: F# will ruin other languages for you. I find it rather painful to work in basically anything else after using F#, with gradients of pain for different languages. Haha.

And that's a good question. I have basically every book written on F#, but I can't say I have ever used them for anything more than reference.

The official docs/guide/reference are actually really good, and I refer to them a lot when using some feature I'm not familiar with: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/what-is-fshar...

F# For Fun and Profit is well-known, but I can't say I use it a lot: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

The same author's (Scott Wlaschin) book is very good: https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-func...

As for books, I have always liked:

* Functional Programming Using F# by Hansen and Rischel (might be too simple if you are already comfortable with functional programming and is out of date every now and then with changes to F# that's happened)

* Expert F# 4.0 by Don Syme and others (contains a lot of nice things by the designer of F#

One of the latest books is Stylish F# 6: Crafting Elegant Functional Code for .NET 6 by Kit Eason. I have the first edition but haven't read it.

My personal recommendation is to take the approach of type/domain driven design. That is, I start off every F# module the same:

1. Define my types with discriminated unions, records, type aliases (such as for tuples) or single case discriminated unions. Use classes when necessary but try to prefer the more functional types.

2. Start writing functions against these.

And that's basically it. One thing to recognize with F# is that it mixes OOP rather nicely. Even discriminated unions and records, which are immutable, can have members defined on them, including operator overloading (something F# is pretty good about). They can even implement interfaces and be defined with generic types, which is also nice and powerful.

I have some projects that might of interest, since they're simple enough and illustrate the above process.

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

https://github.com/bmitc/nand2tetris

Lastly, I'd suggest just starting up some projects. You could also take the Programming Languages course on Coursera by Dan Grossman. Part A uses SML, and you could port the examples and homework solutions to F# (I did so when I took the course). I also take books written for other languages and port the code to F#, usually taking a more idiomatic functional style. .NET Interactive notebooks (https://github.com/dotnet/interactive) are a great way to get started. You just need to install the .NET 6 SDK (which gets you F#) and then install the .NET Interactive Notebook extension in VS Code. That's it. There is also the book The Little MLer which gets people comfortable with discriminated unions (sum types), and I used the book and ported the examples to F#. I need to go back and finish that annotation project (https://github.com/bmitc/the-little-fsharper). I'll probably convert the script files to .NET Interactive notebooks if I do.

Here's mine, which is only about halfway through: https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

I used FsUnit here: https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp/tree/main/RayTracerChallenge/XUnitTests

Yes, the book has both implementations of the required functions (for all the complicated ones you need) and tests all written in pseudocode.

The book is really good. I have a half-finished implementation in F#, and what I find striking is just how close the F# code is to the pseudocode. I have also started an idiomatic port to Racket but have only done the tuples, vector, and point implementations so far. I need to pick these up again.

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-racket

I mean, check this out: https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp/blo...

I have also worked through pieces of Ray Tracing in One Weekend (what was referenced in this post). They get you going much faster, but the code is written in C++. I found the translation to a functional style was harder (was just using Racket and F#'s mutability features), whereas the way The Ray Tracer Challenge is laid out and specified, I found it much easier to translate to an idiomatic functional style.

Another project of mine is going through the book The Ray Tracer Challenge with F#. The book is language agnostic and represents the code with pseudocode and presents a test driven approach. My repository is here: https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

I highly recommend the two books:

Ray Tracing in One Weekend: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B5AODD8/

The Ray Tracer Challenge: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1680502719/

For the latter, I have made it a pretty good way through the book, implementing a functional (in the programming paradigm sense) version of the ray tracer in F#. It’s actually rather mind boggling how close the F# code and tests are to the psuedocode found in the book.

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

All of this will be accomplished inside of a single Polyglot Notebook. If you're not familiar with Polyglot Notebooks, they're a technology built on top of Jupyter Notebooks that allow you to use additional language kernels, including a F# Kernel. This lets you run interactive data science experiments in a single notebook as shown here in VS Code:

I use .NET on Linux and the experience with Rider has been great. The workflow transfers really well between Mac, Windows, and Linux, and everything works the way you expect. The only problems I run into are that there are still things that are Windows focused. For example MAUI does not run on Linux which is a shame because we could use another cross platform GUI.

There are still bugs, for example I ran into one with Polyglot Notebooks not working on Manjaro or Pop!_OS https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/issues/3159

First of all, if you have a small amount of code that lives in an individual C# file and you wanted to reference it in your notebook, you can do this via the #!import magic command as shown below:

My 2 cents: use a Personal Access Token instead of a password, it is much safer (even though not 100% safe). Some references: https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/discussions/1340 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/accounts/use-personal-access-tokens-to-authenticate

See also https://github.com/dotnet/interactive

U have Powershell notebooks https://github.com/dotnet/interactive

Or Rider or simply install dotnet by itself (very easy) and code in a notepad or VSCode. .NET interactive is another awesome way to start: https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/blob/main/docs/display-output-csharp.md

Hi! My name is Claudia and I am a PM at Microsoft (opinions are my own) working on Polyglot Notebooks in VS Code. Polyglot Notebooks are exactly what you are describing! They are notebooks where you can use multiple languages AND share variables between them to ensure a continuous workflow. Not only that, but each language has language server support. Polyglot Notebooks currently supports C#, F#, PowerShell, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, KQL, and Mermaid.

We have just added support for Python and R integration and I am actually in search of external testers! If you are willing to sign an NDA to try out our Python and R integration and give us feedback please drop your email in the form below and I will reach out with instructions for you to try it out!

https://forms.office.com/r/UQchfQSGa5

If you'd like to start trying it out today you can install the extension from the marketplace here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

https://github.com/dotnet/interactive

I've been excited about a lot of the work being done in .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebooks, particuarly with ML with F#. I don't know too much about ML, so I thought I'd check out ML.NET.