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I sometimes like to imagine a world in which .NET was cross-platform and open source from the start such that when F# was introduced it took over everywhere Pyt
by bmitc 4y ago
I sometimes like to imagine a world in which .NET was cross-platform and open source from the start such that when F# was introduced it took over everywhere Python was popping up. It's a fantastic world to imagine but a depressing reoccurring dream.
- 2mol 4y agoI love F#, but honestly Microsoft really hadn't built up the kind of trust back then (and maybe even now) to make this an even remotely realistic scenario.
- lynndotpy 4y agoTrust is one issue, another mah be perception. I know Microsoft has been embracing and extending open source recently, but I didn't know F# was open source. Even then, I still have the impression it's very much "Microsoft stack" and not worth investing energy in unless I'm doing "Microsoft stack" stuff.
- bmitc 4y agoF# has been open-source since the beginning or at least for a long time (before .NET Core).
- einpoklum 4y ago> It's a fantastic world to imagine How so? Link? Many people have never seen an F# program.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoDepressing is something of an understatement. It's a fundamental unfairness of this world. We have all these nice technologies that never reach critical mass while far worse projects enjoy the support and investment of the whole world. Such is life for all Right Things.
- seanhunter 4y agoUnfortunately for your timeline Python was already in wide use before F# was released (2005). You'd need .NET and F# to have been invented a little earlier for that to work out.
- bmitc 4y agoYes, but it was before the Python 3 debacle, and certainly early enough to be a contender. F# is a vastly superior language compared to Python and the core is much simpler. And look at Visual Studio Code for an example when Microsoft puts their might behind something. It only took 3-5 years for Visual Studio Code to dominate. But obviously this is all hypothetical, because it also needs Microsoft to treat F# as something other than a research tool to bring features into C#. I really don’t know why they didn’t view F# as a way to take market share from Python. It could have brought legions into their ecosystem. (Hypothetical given many’s weird obsession with hating anything Microsoft does.)
- seanhunter 4y agoHey I was using ocaml before F# was a thing so you don't have to sell me on the advantages of F# as a language. In fact F# seems to solve the one thing that I used to find really annoying about the ocaml ecosystem which was building with different libraries and extensions (it's been a while but I remember lots of painful headscratching trying to figure out problems with this). The anti-Microsoft bias at the time was pretty strong in most of the open source community given the various dirty tricks that had been employed against Linux around 2000. Within the corporate world there was a big strategic split between folks who were all-in on microsoft and .NET vs people who wanted open source and Java (I worked at a big bank at the time and this was a very sharp point of division with careers made and broken on the back of tech choices, fear or otherwise of vendor lock-in etc). As for MS's strategy, my recollection is at the time MS was all-in on C# and trying to replace C++ and Java rather than pushing F#, which was somewhat of a side-gig for them. Visual Studio was very dominant in terms of IDE then both for C++ and C#, with only Java guys and unix nerds like me using anything else.