Out of curiosity: can a developer totally foreign to .NET, C#, and Windows programming in general become productive with F#?
(I mean, without having to learn the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem)
(I mean, without having to learn the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem)
Over half of these people have since said they LOVE F#, and it makes them happy to use it. That it makes them better programmers, and that C# is just verbose and annoying in comparison.
As far as the Windows ecosystem, you don't need to learn much about it, though Visual Studio is a great IDE for F#. But there's IDEs on Linux and Mono specifically says they support F#.
(Honest question. I'm very interested in the question of the approachability of functional languages)
* Code is less clear than C style (type inference, not used to some pervasive operators like function composition or piping)
* Code is terse and short names are more prevalent (Lost the way to kingdom of nouns)
* There is no Resharper support, and Visual Studio (the main IDE with F# support) tooling is not as advanced as for C#, which is impairing to some extent if you look use the language like a glorified C# and not too used to F# way (tooling is great compared to many other languages IMHO)
* There is no do/while or goto or break
The non-programmers are less positive. From them, I hear "Yeah but it's so concise no one can understand it"[1]. I once got a "If we use F#, then when we exit for (huge figure) we might get less money.[2] Or the general "but this isn't mainstream" (MS's fault for shitty F# marketing.)
And there's also the "ok but we can't find hires". Which is the second worst one. Because on anything that's not some boring CRUD like app, the work to learn the domain and everything about the app dwarfs learning a new language.
(The worst excuse is the nonsense "best tool for the job" as if F# didn't out-class C# in essentially every single aspect. I find this excuse is pulled out a lot, as a way to handwave away real criticism or discussion.)
1: This is just unfamiliarity. In general, less code = less bugs, less work to understand. 2: True if you're selling a business that's a simple website. Not true if you're selling a business that revolves around all your code does.
There are also a bunch of F# centric projects (http://fsprojects.github.io/) which might help you to stay in mostly functional programming land and not mingle too much with OOP.
The main difficulty is to get runtime working well, I think Mono has come a long way and is now well packaged and stable enough to get a good experience of the language, thanks to Xamarin who really invested a lot of efforts.
Microsoft is allegedly working on its open source implementation of .NET Framework and runtime, which just landed official F# support, but I think right now the experience and eco-system support has catch-up to do with what can be done with Mono.
Hope this helps!
Ironically, I then jumped to F# since I figured at least the tooling had to be better (since it was a .NET language). I have zero experience with the .NET stack, and my entire use-case for Windows is "use Steam to stream games to my Linux machine hooked up to the TV."
The tooling in a non-VisualStudio, non-Windows way is actually pretty good; Installing Mono is easy, and from there I'd recommend grabbing Visual Studio Code and the Ionide plugin for it. (Or, if you're a vim guy like me, vim-fsharp is also pretty good).
Paket for dependency management is good and kinda like what you'd expect to see in the Ruby world, and and FAKE is a good build system so that you don't necessarily have to touch the nasty MSBuild stuff too much.
There's another project, Forge, in the works for automating away MSBuild's nonsense so that you don't have to deal with it (too much), which is good.
F# is my primary language because it is the best on MS stack.
This isn't a bad thing: knowing the runtime well is a very marketable skill, and helps you write better software anyway. See it as an opportunity rather than a liability.
The more you end up using external libraries, the more you'll have to understand interop between F# and C#. That sort of thing bit me with Xamarin in the past, but it looks like it is getting better (I hope!).
F# was the first cross-platform language from .NET, so it has better supported on OSX and Linux platforms.