Question

I’ve searched on the Internet for comparisons between F# and Haskell but haven’t found anything really definitive. What are the primary differences and why would I want to choose one over the other?

Answer 1

Haskell is a ‘pure’ functional language, where as F# has aspects of both imperative/OO and functional languages. Haskell also has lazy evaluation, which is fairly rare amongst functional languages.

What do these things mean? A pure functional language, means there are no side effects (or changes in shared state, when a function is called) which means that you are guaranteed that if you call f(x), nothing else happens besides returning a value from the function, such as console output, database output, changes to global or static variables.. and although Haskell can have non pure functions (through monads), it must be ‘explicitly’ implied through declaration.

Pure functional languages and ‘No side effect’ programming has gained popularity recently as it lends itself well to multi core concurrency, as it is much harder to get wrong with no shared state, rather than myriad locks & semaphores.

Lazy evaluation is where a function is NOT evaluated until it is absolutely necessary required. meaning that many operation can be avoided when not necessary. Think of this in a basic C# if clause such as this:

if(IsSomethingTrue() && AnotherThingTrue()) {     do something; } 

If IsSomethingTrue() is false then AnotherThingTrue() method is never evaluated.

While Haskell is an amazing language, the major benefit of F# (for the time being), is that it sits on top of the CLR. This lends it self to polyglot programming. One day, you may write your web UI in ASP.net MVC, your business logic in C#, your core algorithms in F# and your unit tests in Ironruby…. All amongst the the .Net framework.

Listen to the Software Engineering radio with Simon Peyton Jones for more info on Haskell: Episode 108: Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell