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Unfortunately 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

Unfortunately 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  Hey 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.

Unfortunately 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 ago

Yes, 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 ago
Hey 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.