7 ms·

It's nice to see their strong continuing support for F#. I'm no longer in the .NET ecosystem but when I was learning F# and using it day to day was some of the

It's nice to see their strong continuing support for F#. I'm no longer in the .NET ecosystem but when I was learning F# and using it day to day was some of the most enjoyable paid programming I've done

MichaelGG 10y ago
I wouldn't call it strong continuing support. F#'s been a second class citizen both in resources given and marketing support. Community effort is great, but as long as MS pushes C# as the flagship language instead of giving it the equal-or-lesser footing it deserves, F# can't truly pull ahead. It's good to see C# catching up with the past decades of language research. Maybe it's MS's DNA - they're still heavily pushing C++. Tooling is the only real reason to ever use C# over F# - C# just doesn't do much (anything?) better. That, and legacy/enterprisey dev. Heck, C# 7's tuple support is exactly what F# used to do, but then capitulated to MS's idea of making System.Tuple, a reference (heap allocated) type. Now in C# 7 since they finally got around to being a bit serious, they implement a new value-type tuple. I guess we should be happy for any F# support we get. And indeed, tooling for functional languages is poor in general, so F# certainly leads...
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  I feel like this was addressed a bit in the linked blog post: the support is getting better and it's now "in the family" as opposed to a primarily community and research-supported "toy". I'm looking for the nearing releases where F# starts to share much more of the same Roslyn platform that C# and VB have been using for a while now. That should be some very interesting tooling to have at F#'s disposal. C# is always going to be the flagship for the same reason that C/C++/Java/et al are still some of the most common programming languages in the world. That doesn't mean that we can't expect good things from F#, though.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    F# has shipped with VS for the better part of a decade now though, yet tooling doesn't reflect that. Hopefully this will improve. It's just frustrating seeing C# slowly adopt stuff that was known to be good decades ago...
- DennisP 10y ago
  When I was doing .Net full-time I really wanted to get into F#. But... - I wanted to use it for websites. Sorry, not really supported in MVC. - I thought it'd be great for doing .Net stuff in SQL-Server and SSIS, like you can with VB and C#. But it's not supported there either. They always positioned it as "use F# for the extra hard stuff and C# for everything else," but in the end C# isn't terrible for hard stuff, and if that's what you use all day then for you, C# is probably better.
  - jug 10y ago
    Not even just about web projects. Even standard GUI apps have no ready templates at least in VS 2015. Just Console apps. Even if guides online show how you can easily hack together both GUI apps as well as e.g ASP .NET Web API's! I'd like to see some love there. These simple things introduces needless uncertainty about the language.
    - dgudkov 10y ago
      There are a few F# WPF templates. Here is one: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanielMohl.FWindowsAppWPFMVVM https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanielMo...
  - enricosada 10y ago
    About web: - use Suave (https://suave.io/ https://suave.io/), best from f#, works on .netcore too - use Aspnet Core Mvc (just `dotnet new -l fsharp -t web` in dotnetcore), or just aspnet core
- MadsTorgersen 10y ago
  You're seeing us strike a balance here. As I point out in the post, there are millions of C# developers, and tens of thousands of F# developers. However, we think F# has awesome growth potential, and is great for .NET in general. So while we can't defend spending the same resources on it as we do on C#, we want to do what it takes to nurture it and keep it healthy and growing. Being on the inside at Microsoft over the past years, it's been great to see more and more of the organization think of F# as part of the family.
  - oblio 10y ago
    In my opinion Microsoft should focus more on base tools for F#, such as Roslyn, integration with dotnet core, etc. Integration with Visual Studio is nice, but if the language is to be adopted in hacker circles, without major Microsoft investment, it needs to provide very solid and flexible tools on top of which the community can build awesome things. Example of small things Microsoft can help with: as far as I can see Nuclide doesn't work with dotnet core (only Mono). Throwing 1-2 devs that way would pay good dividends, in my opinion.
    - wluu 10y ago
      > Example of small things Microsoft can help with: as far as I can see Nuclide doesn't work with dotnet core (only Mono). Throwing 1-2 devs that way would pay good dividends, in my opinion. I don't know anything about Nuclide, but if they want to work with dotnet core, they should look into working with omnisharp-roslyn[0]. VS Code[1] and Atom[2] both have extensions that work with it. > In my opinion Microsoft should focus more on base tools for F#, such as Roslyn, integration with dotnet core, etc. I think there's already work underway for F# support for dotnet core[6]. As far as F# support for editors go, have a look at ionide[4]. They only have extensions for VS Code and Atom at the moment. > Integration with Visual Studio is nice, but if the language is to be adopted in hacker circles, without major Microsoft investment, it needs to provide very solid and flexible tools on top of which the community can build awesome things. Have you seen omnisharp[5]? If so, what's missing from that? [0] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn [1] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode [2] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-atom https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-atom [3] https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol [4] http://ionide.io/ http://ionide.io/ [5] http://www.omnisharp.net/ http://www.omnisharp.net/ [6] https://github.com/dotnet/netcorecli-fsc https://github.com/dotnet/netcorecli-fsc
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  I am interested in F# for enterprisey web development. Is there a good resource/guide for using F# for ASP.NET MVC?

MichaelGG 10y ago

I wouldn't call it strong continuing support. F#'s been a second class citizen both in resources given and marketing support. Community effort is great, but as long as MS pushes C# as the flagship language instead of giving it the equal-or-lesser footing it deserves, F# can't truly pull ahead. It's good to see C# catching up with the past decades of language research. Maybe it's MS's DNA - they're still heavily pushing C++. Tooling is the only real reason to ever use C# over F# - C# just doesn't do much (anything?) better. That, and legacy/enterprisey dev. Heck, C# 7's tuple support is exactly what F# used to do, but then capitulated to MS's idea of making System.Tuple, a reference (heap allocated) type. Now in C# 7 since they finally got around to being a bit serious, they implement a new value-type tuple. I guess we should be happy for any F# support we get. And indeed, tooling for functional languages is poor in general, so F# certainly leads...

WorldMaker 10y ago
I feel like this was addressed a bit in the linked blog post: the support is getting better and it's now "in the family" as opposed to a primarily community and research-supported "toy". I'm looking for the nearing releases where F# starts to share much more of the same Roslyn platform that C# and VB have been using for a while now. That should be some very interesting tooling to have at F#'s disposal. C# is always going to be the flagship for the same reason that C/C++/Java/et al are still some of the most common programming languages in the world. That doesn't mean that we can't expect good things from F#, though.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  F# has shipped with VS for the better part of a decade now though, yet tooling doesn't reflect that. Hopefully this will improve. It's just frustrating seeing C# slowly adopt stuff that was known to be good decades ago...
DennisP 10y ago
When I was doing .Net full-time I really wanted to get into F#. But... - I wanted to use it for websites. Sorry, not really supported in MVC. - I thought it'd be great for doing .Net stuff in SQL-Server and SSIS, like you can with VB and C#. But it's not supported there either. They always positioned it as "use F# for the extra hard stuff and C# for everything else," but in the end C# isn't terrible for hard stuff, and if that's what you use all day then for you, C# is probably better.
- jug 10y ago
  Not even just about web projects. Even standard GUI apps have no ready templates at least in VS 2015. Just Console apps. Even if guides online show how you can easily hack together both GUI apps as well as e.g ASP .NET Web API's! I'd like to see some love there. These simple things introduces needless uncertainty about the language.
  - dgudkov 10y ago
    There are a few F# WPF templates. Here is one: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanielMohl.FWindowsAppWPFMVVM https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DanielMo...
- enricosada 10y ago
  About web: - use Suave (https://suave.io/ https://suave.io/), best from f#, works on .netcore too - use Aspnet Core Mvc (just `dotnet new -l fsharp -t web` in dotnetcore), or just aspnet core
MadsTorgersen 10y ago
You're seeing us strike a balance here. As I point out in the post, there are millions of C# developers, and tens of thousands of F# developers. However, we think F# has awesome growth potential, and is great for .NET in general. So while we can't defend spending the same resources on it as we do on C#, we want to do what it takes to nurture it and keep it healthy and growing. Being on the inside at Microsoft over the past years, it's been great to see more and more of the organization think of F# as part of the family.
- oblio 10y ago
  In my opinion Microsoft should focus more on base tools for F#, such as Roslyn, integration with dotnet core, etc. Integration with Visual Studio is nice, but if the language is to be adopted in hacker circles, without major Microsoft investment, it needs to provide very solid and flexible tools on top of which the community can build awesome things. Example of small things Microsoft can help with: as far as I can see Nuclide doesn't work with dotnet core (only Mono). Throwing 1-2 devs that way would pay good dividends, in my opinion.
  - wluu 10y ago
    > Example of small things Microsoft can help with: as far as I can see Nuclide doesn't work with dotnet core (only Mono). Throwing 1-2 devs that way would pay good dividends, in my opinion. I don't know anything about Nuclide, but if they want to work with dotnet core, they should look into working with omnisharp-roslyn[0]. VS Code[1] and Atom[2] both have extensions that work with it. > In my opinion Microsoft should focus more on base tools for F#, such as Roslyn, integration with dotnet core, etc. I think there's already work underway for F# support for dotnet core[6]. As far as F# support for editors go, have a look at ionide[4]. They only have extensions for VS Code and Atom at the moment. > Integration with Visual Studio is nice, but if the language is to be adopted in hacker circles, without major Microsoft investment, it needs to provide very solid and flexible tools on top of which the community can build awesome things. Have you seen omnisharp[5]? If so, what's missing from that? [0] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-roslyn [1] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode [2] https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-atom https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-atom [3] https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol [4] http://ionide.io/ http://ionide.io/ [5] http://www.omnisharp.net/ http://www.omnisharp.net/ [6] https://github.com/dotnet/netcorecli-fsc https://github.com/dotnet/netcorecli-fsc
NoGravitas 10y ago
I am interested in F# for enterprisey web development. Is there a good resource/guide for using F# for ASP.NET MVC?