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I spent a bunch of time using F#, and it is good, but C# is a seriously good language and the advantages of F# kind of turned out to be minimal, and most annoyi
by keithnz 9y ago
I spent a bunch of time using F#, and it is good, but C# is a seriously good language and the advantages of F# kind of turned out to be minimal, and most annoyingly, not well supported by the tooling.
On the F# slack channel I asked what was the compelling reason for F#, why isn't it more popular, and basically there wasn't one. There's some stand out language syntax like computation expressions. The community is really good, but F# specific libraries are very quiet, web libraries like suave are ok, but kind of lifeless.
More interestingly, when I shifted a bunch of F# projects to C#, it was relatively straight forward. C# has enough syntax to do a lot of things functionally (though not as concise)
- daxfohl 9y agoI think this nails it. C# is a really good language. F# has some advantages, some disadvantages, but there's not much clamor for something better in the dotnet world. Java and Objective-C are far behind as languages, so the motivations for Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Swift were far greater.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThat's part of it, but I think the fact that "the .NET world" is largely enterprise, with is both less sensitive to language quality and more averse to change (whatever quality it brings) than much of the rest of the dev world is also a factor.
- keithnz 9y agodo you have an evidence for that? It seems a weird thing to say when C# is such a high quality language, and C# (and .net) keeps adapting and changing. There are some advantages with stronger functional languages. Though C# seems to be slowly but surely working out how to incorporate more functional ideas. Though never will be a "functional language" but will support a functional approach.
- nickpeterson 9y agoI've always wondered if you ported F# to the JVM if it would suddenly become much more popular.