4 ms·

Haha :) The title could be qualified with "in our company", but then nobody would read it! ;) I love F#, but I'm not sure it's currently getting the love it d

by d2p 12y ago

Haha :) The title could be qualified with "in our company", but then nobody would read it! ;) I love F#, but I'm not sure it's currently getting the love it deserves from MS :(

pjmlp 12y ago
Microsoft is playing it safe, as their main customers are the enterprise. They see F# is easier to sell to the enterprise as a library language, not as a full stack one. Hence leaving that support role for the community. It sucks a bit yes, but on the other hand F# is doing pretty well in the financial sector in London, for example.
yulaow 12y ago
To me seems that no one is happy with MS. Those used to make c++ and COM/win32 as their main platform think MS has definitively abandoned them and will soon or late drop its support and bet everything on managed languages. Those that now are trying to use javascript think that MS is using it just as a fourth class citizen and will soon or late drop it without much emotions and/or that anyway the documentation support is very poor intentionally. Those of C# think that MS is making fun of them constantly switching from a framework to another and, anyway, that MS is surely betting all again on c++ and javascript. Those of F# think that MS is investing nothing in it and that it is considered just a bastard son of C# and tries to never speak about it. So if you hear all the voices it seems that MS is investing in nothing and making all unhappy. OR, maybe, the grass is always greener on the other side.
- tracker1 12y ago
  I think that given MS's own history of creating dead ends, then dropping them you can't fault them too much. MS does simply respond to market demand more or less than anything. And sometimes there's internal developer demand. MS invested quite a bit into NodeJS and libuv for windows. That said, they did little to actually get a tooling option for making native modules easier. I would think that this was to first and foremost get node.js into a place where it is an Azure option. Not to mention that it seems some of their own tooling in this space is using it. After MS announced the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with managed JScript as it's debut language of choice, I was rather excited. When they brought in IronPython and IronRuby, I was happier still. A unifying platform for many dynamic languages seemed pretty awesome. Then JScript fell to the side, and before long MS support for IronPython, IronRuby and the runtime itself fell to the side. MS can't support everyone 100%, and backing nothing but .Net has certainly cost them mind share. It's also not like MS is a single hive mind. There are lots of people that have come and gone over the years. I think MS does what its' paying customers (and potentially paying customers) asks of it. The irony is a lot of this effort has been into a platform (Azure), whose sales and marketing tactics were the biggest driver of me to look away from .Net in the first place. For many years every .Net presentation from MS was pretty much an Azure demo.. and only in the past year or so has Azure actually become a platform worth considering. That said, I hate a hard sell. I think MS sees the writing on the wall, and knows they'll remain a first class citizen for many developer desktops, and an also ran for the mobile space. That means going hard into both tools, and support. They need Azure, and they need Visual Studio to be a best of breed platform. They've done a decent job at both. If they can get your code to run in Azure, you're a potential customer.. so they'll work to support that.
tpetricek 12y ago
To be honest, I think that "not getting the love it deserves from MS" is the best thing that happened to F# :-). They did really good job at supporting the community - by open-sourcing F# and now also accepting contributions to the official MS release. But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#. If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways. Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)
- d2p 12y ago
  For the language, maybe so; but MS are building great tools for C#/VB and it's senseless for the community to reimplement them for the "other" .NET language :( The refactor/codefix support in Roslyn/VS is great; but I wouldn't even know where to start doing something similar in F#? Can I reuse the functionality? Or is the editor so disconnected that I'd need to implement all the menu etc. myself too? (This would make it inconsistent and not play nice with submissions else's CodeFixes that might draw menus).

by d2p 12y ago

Haha :) The title could be qualified with "in our company", but then nobody would read it! ;) I love F#, but I'm not sure it's currently getting the love it deserves from MS :(

pjmlp 12y ago

Microsoft is playing it safe, as their main customers are the enterprise. They see F# is easier to sell to the enterprise as a library language, not as a full stack one. Hence leaving that support role for the community. It sucks a bit yes, but on the other hand F# is doing pretty well in the financial sector in London, for example.

yulaow 12y ago

To me seems that no one is happy with MS. Those used to make c++ and COM/win32 as their main platform think MS has definitively abandoned them and will soon or late drop its support and bet everything on managed languages. Those that now are trying to use javascript think that MS is using it just as a fourth class citizen and will soon or late drop it without much emotions and/or that anyway the documentation support is very poor intentionally. Those of C# think that MS is making fun of them constantly switching from a framework to another and, anyway, that MS is surely betting all again on c++ and javascript. Those of F# think that MS is investing nothing in it and that it is considered just a bastard son of C# and tries to never speak about it. So if you hear all the voices it seems that MS is investing in nothing and making all unhappy. OR, maybe, the grass is always greener on the other side.

tracker1 12y ago
I think that given MS's own history of creating dead ends, then dropping them you can't fault them too much. MS does simply respond to market demand more or less than anything. And sometimes there's internal developer demand. MS invested quite a bit into NodeJS and libuv for windows. That said, they did little to actually get a tooling option for making native modules easier. I would think that this was to first and foremost get node.js into a place where it is an Azure option. Not to mention that it seems some of their own tooling in this space is using it. After MS announced the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with managed JScript as it's debut language of choice, I was rather excited. When they brought in IronPython and IronRuby, I was happier still. A unifying platform for many dynamic languages seemed pretty awesome. Then JScript fell to the side, and before long MS support for IronPython, IronRuby and the runtime itself fell to the side. MS can't support everyone 100%, and backing nothing but .Net has certainly cost them mind share. It's also not like MS is a single hive mind. There are lots of people that have come and gone over the years. I think MS does what its' paying customers (and potentially paying customers) asks of it. The irony is a lot of this effort has been into a platform (Azure), whose sales and marketing tactics were the biggest driver of me to look away from .Net in the first place. For many years every .Net presentation from MS was pretty much an Azure demo.. and only in the past year or so has Azure actually become a platform worth considering. That said, I hate a hard sell. I think MS sees the writing on the wall, and knows they'll remain a first class citizen for many developer desktops, and an also ran for the mobile space. That means going hard into both tools, and support. They need Azure, and they need Visual Studio to be a best of breed platform. They've done a decent job at both. If they can get your code to run in Azure, you're a potential customer.. so they'll work to support that.

tpetricek 12y ago

To be honest, I think that "not getting the love it deserves from MS" is the best thing that happened to F# :-). They did really good job at supporting the community - by open-sourcing F# and now also accepting contributions to the official MS release. But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#. If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways. Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)

d2p 12y ago
For the language, maybe so; but MS are building great tools for C#/VB and it's senseless for the community to reimplement them for the "other" .NET language :( The refactor/codefix support in Roslyn/VS is great; but I wouldn't even know where to start doing something similar in F#? Can I reuse the functionality? Or is the editor so disconnected that I'd need to implement all the menu etc. myself too? (This would make it inconsistent and not play nice with submissions else's CodeFixes that might draw menus).