On the road from C# to F#

After spending a few years working mostly with C#, it has become a natural, comfortable way to think about programming problems. I won’t complain about it – comfort is nice. At the same time, I strongly believe in questioning what you do, especially the un-stated assumptions. When you start doing things a certain way without asking yourself if this is indeed the way to go, you are on a dangerous path, especially in a fast-evolving field like software engineering. So when I read the advice to”learn one new language every year”, it resonated, and I decided to give a shot at F#.

I purchased “Programming F#”, and I am working my way through the Project Euler problems as an exercise.

This is my first exposure to functional languages, and it has proven a very stimulating mental exercise so far. One particular aspect I have struggled with is if ... then statements. Chris Smith says that “if expressions work just as you would expect”. That’s sort of true, except for the fact that an if ... then statement with no else clause can’t return a value.

This made me realize how much I use single-pronged if statements in C#, guard clauses being a prime example.

As a practical example, consider the following. If I were to identify whether a particular number is prime in C#, I would write something along these lines:

public bool IsPrime(int n)
{
    for (int i = 2; i < n; i++)
    {
        if (n % i == 0)
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

This code is obviously sub-optimal, but that’s not the point here. The direct transposition in F# just won’t execute, because the if statement can’t return a value:

let IsPrime n =
  for i in 2 .. n - 1 do
    if n % d = 0
      false  
  true;;

I won’t claim that the following is the”right” way to do it, but it is the closest equivalent I could come up with:

let IsPrime n =
  seq {2 .. n-1} |> Seq.exists (fun i -> n % i = 0) |> not

This could be loosely translated as “look up the sequence of 2 to n-1, and if there is a divider, it is not a prime number”.

I found this example interesting for a few reasons.

First, it made me realize how deeply the pattern if some condition is true, do something was ingrained in my brain. Then, it made me wonder what the upside of that constraint was. I won’t pretend any deep understanding of functional languages yet (it’s just been a week so far), but one thing I noticed was that the idea of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive partitions seems to be very present in F#. One issue with sequential guard clauses is that they are order-dependent, and can leave some cases uncovered in a non-obvious way. Forcing each if to have an else counterpart removes that problem by construction.

I am still unsure whether this idea will make it into my C# code, and what form it would take. I can’t quite see yet how to do this without going back to

While less obvious in this example, the other realization I came to was that I was still only marginally using lambdas and LINQ in C#, and resorted heavily to explicit iterations through collections. I guess the reason is in part the force of habit, and in part an ill-formed suspicion that by giving up explicit iteration, I may be suffering some performance penalty. Lists and Sequences are deeply baked in F#, and make your life easier - I am now warming to using the equivalent extension methods in my C# code.