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I find it interesting to compare F# with Kotlin. F# had Jet as the one large success story of a full f# shop, but outside of that there weren't many large comp

I find it interesting to compare F# with Kotlin. F# had Jet as the one large success story of a full f# shop, but outside of that there weren't many large companies using a lot of F# (except microsoft internally, and they didn't blog about it _too_ much). Kotlin on the other hand is seeing server-side adoption in quite a few large companies. Google is recommending it as the server-side JVM language for new services going forward. Airbnb and a handful of other large companies blog about having kotlin services in their architecture. There's a few reasons I think Kotlin is succeeding where F# hasn't been able to: * JVM + tooling is a proven and great ecosystem. First-class support for most of your cloud tooling and databases (AWS, Kafka, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, etc). * It has fantastic editor tooling (given that an IDE company created and maintains it). F# for quite a while has had less-than-average tooling (it's gotten better now with newer versions of FSAC, Ionide, and Rider, but it was _rough_ for a while). It's hard to move to something new that's supposed to be safer when your language server has memory leaks or breaks every X hours. I remember stretches of time where I was just writing F# in vim without syntax highlighting because any editor I tried would constantly throw errors in the middle of me coding. That hasn't happened to me with Kotlin. * It's close-enough looking to a scripting language with nice features that it's more approachable. Classes and functions look similar to other languages. It even has block parameters that are inviting for rubyists (although the implementation is different). It also has some syntactic sugar to make some things very ergonomic to work with. * All of the above just works. No big fiddling necessary. The pain points in working with the Java ecosystem are written about and known (largest that come to my mind are coroutines interacting with java threading, exceptions in mixed coroutine/threading environments, and null/optional which Kotlin has some great features built-in to work around). There's also things like arrow-kt and http4k for those desiring the more functional side of things. The one thing that continues to baffle me is how little I see in people talking about kotlin in various communities (slack, discord, reddit, etc) compared to how many people are writing it (both for android and for server-side concerns). The one upside I'll give is that fable has been much better IME than my experience with Kotlin/js. I also prefer F# from a purely language standpoint, but Kotlin is just better to work with.

pjmlp 3y ago
Kotlin is only succeeding on Android thanks to godfather Google, it is hardly used on the JVM. On the JVM is as much as F# on the CLR, as any google trend analytics and similar will show.
throw868788 3y ago
Seems like a common theme that people prefer the F# language, but try to explain reasons why it hasn't succeeded from a technical view. I think the reasons IMO aren't technical but what the author has stated - C# is probably worse (that's my opinion) but people who are working in it don't see the pain. Its marketing, the vibe, etc. Most of the tech issues people state wouldn't be there if adoption was bigger. This is in contrast to Java which for a significant time wasn't showing any evolution which sparked many alt langs on that platform. Sometimes things succeed but silently, and sometimes things that should succeed just don't and maybe there isn't a real explanation. In fact I think the latter across most products is actually the most common outcome, not just in programming languages. TL;DR I agree with the article, it suffers from an adoption chasm. Pain and herd safety are important especially when people are considering their career progression. To your dot points: * I think F# has .NET which is a "proven" and good enough ecosystem as well. You won't get stuck by picking F# even if it means using a C# library. Have to do the same in Scala/Kotlin and the like typically as well. * Editor has caught up, my surprise is that you can write with Vim and kinda get away with it - only find that works in terser/scripting like languages anyway unlike C#. It has wrappers and libraries for doing things in a more F# FP manner if you wish although when I was doing F# I avoided them (i.e. I avoid things like ScalaX most of the time too). * F# has a good scripting story; I've seen F# scripts used quite often by people even if coding in C# to check things and REPL program. * These days F# just works too mostly. `dotnet new webapi/console/etc -lang F#` and you have a webapi for example. * There are F# libraries around for similar things (Http, Collections, Async seq, etc). They are probably maintained to the level they realistically need to be, I would argue they still do their singular job quite well. At some point a library just does what it needs to do. There's things I prefer in the .NET ecosystem as well - value types, inlining, etc. Having said that I seen quite a few people use it professionally to good success but they often don't brag about it and are usually quite senior and reserved about their language choice often citing other worries/risks to a project's success.

pjmlp 3y ago

Kotlin is only succeeding on Android thanks to godfather Google, it is hardly used on the JVM. On the JVM is as much as F# on the CLR, as any google trend analytics and similar will show.

throw868788 3y ago

Seems like a common theme that people prefer the F# language, but try to explain reasons why it hasn't succeeded from a technical view. I think the reasons IMO aren't technical but what the author has stated - C# is probably worse (that's my opinion) but people who are working in it don't see the pain. Its marketing, the vibe, etc. Most of the tech issues people state wouldn't be there if adoption was bigger. This is in contrast to Java which for a significant time wasn't showing any evolution which sparked many alt langs on that platform. Sometimes things succeed but silently, and sometimes things that should succeed just don't and maybe there isn't a real explanation. In fact I think the latter across most products is actually the most common outcome, not just in programming languages. TL;DR I agree with the article, it suffers from an adoption chasm. Pain and herd safety are important especially when people are considering their career progression. To your dot points: * I think F# has .NET which is a "proven" and good enough ecosystem as well. You won't get stuck by picking F# even if it means using a C# library. Have to do the same in Scala/Kotlin and the like typically as well. * Editor has caught up, my surprise is that you can write with Vim and kinda get away with it - only find that works in terser/scripting like languages anyway unlike C#. It has wrappers and libraries for doing things in a more F# FP manner if you wish although when I was doing F# I avoided them (i.e. I avoid things like ScalaX most of the time too). * F# has a good scripting story; I've seen F# scripts used quite often by people even if coding in C# to check things and REPL program. * These days F# just works too mostly. `dotnet new webapi/console/etc -lang F#` and you have a webapi for example. * There are F# libraries around for similar things (Http, Collections, Async seq, etc). They are probably maintained to the level they realistically need to be, I would argue they still do their singular job quite well. At some point a library just does what it needs to do. There's things I prefer in the .NET ecosystem as well - value types, inlining, etc. Having said that I seen quite a few people use it professionally to good success but they often don't brag about it and are usually quite senior and reserved about their language choice often citing other worries/risks to a project's success.