Book Image

Mastering F#

By : Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad
Book Image

Mastering F#

By: Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad

Overview of this book

F# is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and is supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising, creating music-focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web. This book will guide you through the basics and will then help you master F#. The book starts by explaining how to use F# with Visual Studio, file ordering, and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage. It moves on to explain the functional core of F# such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, and lazy evaluation. Next, the book takes you through imperative and asynchronous programming, F# type providers, applications, and testing in F#. Finally, we look into using F# with distributed programming and using F# as a suitable language for data science. In short, this book will help you learn F# for real-world applications and increase your productivity with functional programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, you learned how to do different kinds of automated testing with F#. We started with one of the most popular techniques in .NET and other programming languages or platforms: unit testing. In F#, we can use some of the most widely used unit testing tools for .NET, such as NUnit, and benefit from its extensive functionality and compatibility with different IDEs. F# has some niceties on its own, such as having more informative names for tests and idiomatic syntax.

We then continued with property-based testing. This is not exclusive of F# or other functional programming languages, but the absence of a shared state makes it usually much easier to test properties of our functions for any given set of parameters. FsCheck makes property testing a breeze by automatically generating hundreds of samples to feed into our functions, and gives a stronger indication of robustness than simple unit tests can. FsCheck also has several tools to helps us locate problems, like shrinkers...