I only played with F#, but my day job is writing FP code in Scala, so let me answer this: > I keep wondering why F# doesn't really take off given a lot of peop

I only played with F#, but my day job is writing FP code in Scala, so let me answer this: > I keep wondering why F# doesn't really take off given a lot of peoples fascination with the functional world As a matter of fact there aren't that many people interested in FP, mostly due to a lack of education on the matter. Even many people talking about FP are confused about what FP is. And the problem with the FP ecosystem are the abstractions, which tend to be extremely high level and very productive, however these aren't taught in school and the cost of entry is high. So let me throw this question right back at you: why F# and not Haskell? And note that the answer you give is going to be applicable to C# versus F# and at the same time flawed ;-) And you see, raising the abstraction is one way humanity has always tackled complexity, however this is essentially about vertical scalability of talent - or in other words enabling the same people to handle more challenging problems by giving them better tools. But the trouble is that this is incompatible with horizontal scalability, which is about growing by hiring more and more people, i.e. building assembly lines. So going back to your question, the reason for why not FP is actually simple, but hard to swallow: the software industry is growing due to huge demand, as a consequence a majority of people working in this field are beginners and when the industry has a choice between quality and quantity, it will go for quantity at the expense of quality. On the other hand the good news is that with the proper education, mindset and tools, as a small team, you can still build products that compete with big companies having virtually unlimited resources.