I agree with you that simplicity is another type of freedom, in many cases more valuable. However, when my boss says, “How do we make this faster?”, the freedom of simplicity goes out the window :).

Looking back, I might not have been clear enough in this post. I wanted to show how F# may seem more abstract as it puts constraints on your code beyond even C#. But I also wanted to show that, counterintuitively, this could be beneficial for optimization. Perhaps I muddled this with too many other ideas.

Thanks for the criticism.

But it turns out that nothing is truly unconstrained. Positive choices have negative consequences… If we move “here”, then we’re not “there”. Our choices ultimately create a context in which we operate. So, the freedom we do have is to choose our own constraints and frame the problem in the way we would like to naturally think about it. Alternately, we can frame our thinking according to others’ abstractions. Hopefully, we’re doing both.