The little MLer

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1. nextosMar 2025
   The Little Series, famous for The Little Schemer book, published The Little MLer in 1998.

   It's probably their lesser known volume, but IMHO it makes a terrific job at teaching the ML family and its features.

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2. nextosSep 2024
   I don't think there's a centralized community for the Little Series. I think this is unfortunate. With a community, some great titles like The Little MLer (typed FP) and A Little Java, a Few Patterns (OOP) would be much better known.

   I found those two outstanding. I think A Little Java has been reprinted. But last time I checked, The Little MLer was bloody expensive. Standard ML, OCaml and F# need a lot more exposure. They are simple and practical. The Little MLer does a great job introducing the basics.

   To close the circle, the Little Series is missing a book about concurrent and distributed paradigms à la Erlang. They already have functional programming, typed functional programming, declarative programming, dependent types, theorem proving, object-oriented programming and machine learning.

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3. nextosSep 2024
   With no Scheme or programming background, I'd study HtDP (https://htdp.org) as an interlude, after The Little Schemer. Pace is gentle, and explanations about program design are long and very lucid. After those two, I'd try The Little MLer. The other books are quite advanced, better to build solid foundations first.
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4. bmitcAug 2022
   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.

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5. hackermailmanOct 2018
   Some other texts w/SML:

   The Little MLer: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/ which you can read with the revised Programming in SML http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf

   Discrete Math & Functional Programming: https://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/dmfp/

   Parallel & Sequential Algorithms uses SPARC which is similar to SML for examples in the book http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com/

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6. jimwiseNov 2010
   There _is_ a Little MLer (with examples in Caml and Standard ML), which teaches type-based programming very well, and would be worth reading for anyone setting out to learn Haskell, I imagine (I respect Haskell's purity, but program in ML and Scala, the same way I respect Ada's safety, but program in C, so a better Haskeller than myself may disagree. :-)).

   However, none of the Little ___er books are, of themselves, good ways to learn to use the language they are in; they're more like finger exercises when learning piano -- they reinforce your mental muscles to make thinking in the right way for those languages feel more natural.

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