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I think the main problem is that F# never went beyond .Net platform (e.g. they never released a native compiler). .Net is nice and gets the work done, but the f

by pkese 9y ago

I think the main problem is that F# never went beyond .Net platform (e.g. they never released a native compiler). .Net is nice and gets the work done, but the fact that existing .Net libraries are OOP style means 1) they don't fit as nicely into the F# paradigms (see other people's answers) and 2) adoption is easy for people already familiar with .net and not as easy for people coming from other languages/platforms. In addition, inside the .Net world, F# got a role of just "And you can even do functional programming in .Net if you like", rather than "this is a proper way of how people should write safe high-level code". I think Ximian is the only one giving F# proper handling.

pkese 9y ago
It might be worth also looking into ReasonML, which is a very similar language, but gets some of F# issues right, like: - Targeting native compilation and javascript transpilation out of the box - Proper functionally architected libraries - (including React and React-native for GUIs) - Ocaml style functors - Easy syntax for people who are familiar with javascript - Prime-time promotion by a large company (Facebook) - Targeting unikernels (i.e. MirageOS) makes it geek/buzzword compliant The only downside for ReasonML right now I guess is that the tooling and developer experience (especially on Windows) is nowhere near to what F# / .Net core / VS Code+Ionide already offers on all platforms (Win/OSX/Linux).