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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

The problem is F# doesn't get enough resources internally at Microsoft. How many times has VS shipped missing the latest version of F# tools? In terms of community, it's tiny. If I want to do functional programming, F#/.NET isn't the strongest option. I have several books on F# and as much as I'd like to learn/use it beyond toying around, I can't help but feel like all it's worth using for is tinkering (outside of the few shops that use F# extensively.)

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I find this to be an interesting cultural phenomenon, this thing where people in .NET-land are skittish about F# because it's not so tightly controlled by Microsoft.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure nobody even wants Oracle to be getting involved in Kotlin or Scala or Clojure.

> this thing where people in .NET-land are skittish about F# because it's not so tightly controlled by Microsoft.

Microsoft's great tooling is what has made (traditionally) it sticky for a lot of developers. F#'s tooling from Microsoft has been a half-hearted effort (organizationally, not speaking of the effort that the F# guys have put in.)

The irony is that F#s releases are in lock-step with the Visual tools team releases and schedule.

I must vehemently disagree.

From: https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/2400

"GiorgioG commented on Oct 19, 2017 @masaeedu - Not to beat a dead horse, but we've been waiting for an RTM release of this since May when VS2017 first RTM'd. We were then told it would likely come in the July release of VS, we're now nearing the tail end of October with no clear idea when we'll get it. It's not @cartermp 's fault, just the reality that MS has not made it a high priority (judging by their actions, not their words.) In summary, if you want to use F#, use VSCode, it has excellent support for F#, as long as you realize it's not Visual Studio, it's a souped up text editor."

Perhaps it's not the case anymore, but I meant more that F# language releases used to be delayed until the Visual Tools team was ready to release a new Version for Visual Studio. So essentially, the F# releases seemed to be held up. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong and/or this has changed since the .Net core support came in.

Usually those are the same people that preach OpenJDK, while forgetting that 90% of the contributions come from Oracle.

And that Oracle alongside Sun and IBM has been there since the begging, and other than IBM, no one else made an offer to buy Sun.

Or if the JVM had died with Sun their languages wouldn't even exist.

openjdk exists though and is broadly maintained. i don't know how many people use mono (i honestly don't know) but CLR seems to be the only runtime for F#.

I think that F# has a difficult spot in between. Microsoft has enough control over it to effectively kill it (mostly via the ecosystem), but at the same time does not step up and actually "own" it. Since it's still "their" language, anyone considering it would like to see they're still invested in it, which isn't all too obvious at the moment. On the other hand, if they'd distance themselves more, another organization could step up, become the big name behind it, and provide good stewardship. Right now it's just sort of hanging on the side and (at least) outsiders don't know what's going to happen with that, which doesn't inspire much confidence. They just don't seem to care much.

Latest example, WinUI roadmap doesn't consider F# relevant.

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

Guess what is one of the complains on the feedback thread?

What is the strongest option for functional programming then? I love Clojure as a language but it's almost impossible to find decent jobs with it in my area.

Scala is probably the most pragmatic functional programming language to get a job in. It's on the JVM and you can use all the Java libraries, and it also lets you fall back to an imperative style if you need to.

That sounds exactly the same as F# (except there might be more jobs in scala).

F# is on .NET CLR and you can use all the .NET libraries, and it lets you fall back to an imperative style if you need to!

Try to use EF, WCF, UWP, WPF from F#.

EF isn't really needed with Dapper and the available SQL type providers. Even still it's totally naturally to have a C# project holding the base EF stuff which you reference from your F# projects

Try to use that argument to sell F# to the large majority of .NET shops.

The vast majority of .Net shops would run shrieking when faced with F# code. I still run into people regularly that shun the var keyword for type inference in C# because they think it is actually the evil old VB6 Variant type.

Yep that was kind of my point.

> you can use all the .NET libraries

did you try it?

Hint: there is a lot of things required before F# could use latest WinUI or WPF

I wouldn't call those libraries. If you have something that's actually just a library, using it from F# should not be a problem.

Well, in these cases it's very similar to F#, except it's based on .NET and has different syntax. I guess the main point of the comment above is lacking IDE support - refactoring tools don't exist and autocompletion is also not excelent. Do you know some decent tools for Scala? I don't know much about it, but it could be a very good language if IntelliJ had full support for that.

IntelliJ does have have full support for Scala (through an official plugin): https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/discover-intellij-idea-f...

What about remote work?

Isn't VSCode & Ionide plugin good enough?

VSCode doesn't hold a candle to Visual Studio. I know that's going to be an unpopular opinion around here. Sure there's Rider (which I own/support/like), but if MS can't be bothered to provide first-rate support for F#, why should I bother investing time into learning F# when there are more popular alternatives?

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