3 ms·

I'm sure I was in that room with Reed (the OP) a year ago in November. Although I don't recall the details of the conversation, I do recall the feeling within t

I'm sure I was in that room with Reed (the OP) a year ago in November. Although I don't recall the details of the conversation, I do recall the feeling within the F# community of accomplishment up until then (Nov. 2013), and excitement looking forward. As the post summarizes, 2014 was a year of great progress for both the F# language and the community. On the community side I used to know personally or through social media most of the movers and shakers. Today it seems like there is a steady stream of new contributors posting OSS projects and technical articles, far too many for me to remember or keep up with. Sergy Tihon's F# Weekly https://sergeytihon.wordpress.com/category/f-weekly/ https://sergeytihon.wordpress.com/category/f-weekly/ covers more F# news than I can possibly track. If you believe the future of software engineering includes strongly typed functional languages, then F# is the place to be for many reasons: 1) Microsoft has settled into the role of corporate curator of the language, core libraries, and core tools. I personally know the small MS team supporting F#, and I can tell you they are motivated, enthusiastic, and very capable in this role. I can also tell you the major players in the other MS language and tooling teams take an interest in following the progress of F#. Not to mention the world's most advanced quantum computing simulation compiler is written in F#. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=209634 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2096... 2) F# is Microsoft's longest running major OSS effort, and the experience no doubt played a role in how MS roled out the recent open sourcing of .NET and commitment to making .NET cross-platform. Keep an eye on developments in this area, it will strengthen F# as a cross platform language. 3) And finally if you have an interest in hacking on functional languages, core components, libraries, tooling, etc., this is the place to be. You can make OSS contributions which will make a difference to users around the world.

MichaelGG 12y ago
It'd be nice though if MS would provide the F# team with more resources, or actually do pro-F# marketing, instead of pushing the inferior-but-with-far-better-tooling C#. For instance, it's embarrassing that MS doesn't have a comprehensive web toolkit for F#, and instead just pushes a mashup of TypeScript and ASP.NET. No doubt the community is great, but the effort that goes into first class VS support seems to require a much larger team doing rather unfun work. To date, it seems only MS has pulled this off.

MichaelGG 12y ago

It'd be nice though if MS would provide the F# team with more resources, or actually do pro-F# marketing, instead of pushing the inferior-but-with-far-better-tooling C#. For instance, it's embarrassing that MS doesn't have a comprehensive web toolkit for F#, and instead just pushes a mashup of TypeScript and ASP.NET. No doubt the community is great, but the effort that goes into first class VS support seems to require a much larger team doing rather unfun work. To date, it seems only MS has pulled this off.