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> F# explores new language possibilities and the community provides a rich experience across platforms. There are several interesting observations to be had he
by bmitc 4y ago
> F# explores new language possibilities and the community provides a rich experience across platforms.
There are several interesting observations to be had here. For one, F# already explored (past tense) new language features and has long been essentially feature complete. It gets little features here and there, which are generally quality of life type of things (like anonymous records, for example).
Another interpretation is that F# is just viewed as a .NET/CLR playground and prototype lab to bring features into C#. This is already a common sentiment, but it looks like Microsoft just came out and said it here.
I'll need to read their full strategy, but the blog post is just the same old story: C# is everything, we'll limp along F# with the community doing most of the work, and, oh yea, Visual Basic.
I read through the F# strategy documents, and there's not really anything of substance there. I'm also not sure it's in F#'s best interest to be forced to comply with new C# features (of course F# needs to adopt new .NET features though). F# already does not support several C# features, for good reason, maintaining only what it needs for interoperability purposes. This just furthers the idea that F# is C#'s playtoy.
It's all unfortunate. F# is one of the best designed modern languages around. I wish people would embrace it like Elixir has been embraced. F# could truly be one of the more popular languages and doesn't have to be used at just ".NET shops".
- BenGosub 4y agoThey should release a roadmap, instead of this bland talk about strategy.
- mastax 4y agohttps://themesof.net/ https://themesof.net/
- justin66 4y ago> I wish people would embrace it like Elixir has been embraced. F# is a lot more popular than Elixir.
- bmitc 4y agoI'm not sure about that given the amount of jobs I have had and found in Elixir, which also has a more vibrant ecosystem. I have strong confidence that I could get another Elixir job. I would be surprised if I could even locate an F# job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 4y agoa quick search on indeed.com reveals 78 elixir jobs (https://www.indeed.com/q-Erlang-Elixir-jobs.html https://www.indeed.com/q-Erlang-Elixir-jobs.html) and 426 f# jobs (https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=F%23 https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=F%23) I’m sure some false positives, but I doubt enough that brings the F# count lower than that for Elixir. ymmv
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cglong 4y ago> F# already does not support several C# features, for good reason, maintaining only what it needs for interoperability purposes. Could you enumerate some of these? My team is still using .NET Framework, so we're missing out on the new C# goodness.
- bmitc 4y agoOne is that C# has partial classes but F# does not. This comes up for all the XAML tooling that C# supports but F# doesn't. Also, F# only has null for use in certain situations only for interoperability. There are others that I've seen but don't know off the top of my head. I think they are usually OOP related and at the edges. I don't much know them because I don't really know C#.
- pharmakom 4y agoAsyncDispose is one more, IIRC
- pjmlp 4y agoAnd if you go for the comments, the confirmation that C++/CLI is also managed by WinDev, not DevDiv (which owns .NET).
- pharmakom 4y agoF# has a bright future, but it’s due to Fable and breaking free of .NET. F# is truly a full stack language now.
- pjmlp 4y agoLatest the F# folks tried to pivot the language into data science and be a safer alternative to Python, only to have Microsoft hire Guido and being the company that finally managed to push the CPython devs to focus on performance, and JIT integration.
- rfreytag 4y agoI think F# is going to do well because it is driven by the community making it an open field despite being .NET. F# developers seem to have a higher than usual lower-bound. Elmish.WPF, FParsec, so much there and still things to do...like better development tooling with VS Studio Pro. If it were a sure thing it wouldn't be a challenge or quite as interesting.