language-ext

> 1. It is possible to write reasonably "functional" applications in .NET. The only problem I had with that is lack of built-in copy-on-write data types and prevalent nullity. I've tried to minmise that pain over the past few years with my 'functional language extensions' for C# [1]. It's a library with most of the common monadic types (as structs so there's no null issues); Immutable collection types that don't have an unweildy naming scheme like like the System.Immutable.Collections library - which are all structs, so no nulls; A type called 'Record<T>' which when you derive a type from it gives your type value-semantics (equality, ordering, GetHashCode, ToString, serialisation/deserialisation) by default; and tons more. You still have to do stuff like build your own With method for immutable types. I have written of how these can be

I would recommend this library https://github.com/louthy/language-ext for functional style programming in C#.

For coding for fun I use F# in VS Code with Ionide. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/g... If you can't use F# at work I really like this https://github.com/louthy/language-ext for a more functional flavor of C#.

There are major issues with not using else - in that there is no obvious way to test whether it should be there or not. Any programmer returning to your code (or even you returning to your code a year later) can't know what the intention was/should be, and neither can the compiler. I try (in C#) to avoid if/else completely (not always possible, but it's a general guide) and I try to work with ternary expressions instead. This forces you to explicitly consider the else case and explicitly state what the intention was. It also makes composition of code blocks simpler and often removes the issues of statement ordering. You can take it further by using Option\Either\Validation monads to reduce the cyclomatic complexity [1]. This approach can allow for composable and reusable validation computations making the job of validation trivial. By

You can :) (Especially with the pattern matching feature) https://github.com/louthy/language-ext