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Since the promise of the CLR was any language one platform they went out and built several different types of languages to see how well it worked. F# actually
by stonemetal 16y ago
Since the promise of the CLR was any language one platform they went out and built several different types of languages to see how well it worked. F# actually attracted developers so they decided to keep it.
Note that F# began life as Ocaml on the CLR, not another language from scratch. Then it picked up "light" syntax and then moved to light as the default syntax. Also note that F# has been around for a while now, so yeah C# 4 isn't bad but C# 4 wasn't even on the horizon when F# got started.
- MrMan 16y agoIs F# still really just another ML flavor? In any way that is meaningful in the real world? Another poster on this thread asserts that F# adoption is happening in finance, by FP practitioners who would <i>otherwise use unix!</i> My impression (perhaps flawed) is that the main audience for F# are C#, Java and other programmers for whom F# is indeed their first foray in FP. It seems like the imperative/functional hybridization of F# mirrors the Scala effort to market itself as a FP language that imperative/OO folks can understand. I am not espousing a point of view, I am asking for insights about how a large firm like MSFT sees the dev tools market, not trying to poke a stick into other folks' ideas about what the best tools are.
- stonemetal 16y agoI would say it is another ML flavor. It has ranged much further from SML than other SML derived languages have. To me it is about like calling clojure or Dylan lisp.