R is great for doing data analysis, but it can be frustrating as a programming language. It doesn’t feel familiar to developers—it pays greater homage to its statistical heritage—and there’s little consistency across the community-built packages.
F#, on the other hand, is first and foremost a programming language. And, as it’s a .NET language, it has access to a enterprise-grade tooling and libraries. As a functional language, it’s a natural fit for scientific and big data computations.
If you are interested in exploring F# as a data science language there’s a great place to get started—the data science section of the F# site.
As well as learning how to use F#, you’ll learn how it integrates with most of the popular data science tools, such as:
- Excel
- R
- MATLAB
- Python
- Mathematica
