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Comment by rusabd | Hacker News Reader

F# is only functional language supported by big corporation. It is not Go level but still it is safe to say that Microsoft has some serious commitment to this language.

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> F# is only functional language supported by big corporation

It might be the only functional language developed “in house” at a major corporation, but it's not the only one supported by a big corporation, as Microsoft (under the GitHub name) is a leading sponsor of the new Haskell Foundation.

As well as employing Simon Peyton Jones.

Jane Street and OCaml would be another good example of deep corporate involvement in an ML family language.

They see it as a better Python for Data Analytics/ML/etc.

After playing around with it and porting some of my python work to F#....they may be right.

This is exactly what I'd like to use F# for. However, I don't know if there's a good ecosystem for F# that gives me anything over Julias, for example.

ML.NET might do it, if that is a domain you care about.

Check out the new features for making feature full scripting files (.fsx)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-f-5/#packag...

I am starting to use this to port some of python data munging scripts. Especially those that have to call external apis because Fsharp data providers are voodoo magic.

https://fsprojects.github.io/FSharp.Data/library/JsonProvide...

It's not _quite_ meant specifically as a better Python, but it can play that role and there is every intention of making that something that has "product truth" to it. You can look forward to some concrete improvements along those lines this year, specifically in the notebooks tooling space and some library support!

In terms of my current use, the new scripting feature with "r# nuget:.." is game changing because now we can freely share .fsx files and they...just work. Compared to praying to the pip/virtualenv gods in the python space.

Really excited to see what ya'll have planned for 2021

Oh yeah, it’s a great feature. People like it a lot more than we thought they would, and we already had high hopes for it! Still more improvements to make there, though.

Just need some firm locking/pinning and I think you have nailed truly reproducible analytical workflows.

You can actually do that today by specifying a version number. The docs cover it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tools/fsharp-...

I've been coming to the opinion that I'll just never be happy with nominal static typing for data science or engineering. I'm curious about structural typing, but, of the languages I've tried so far, only dynamic typing has kept me happy for the long run.

I say that as someone who, prior to getting into the data space, was a fanatical partisan of static typing.

For actually implementing the core bits of analytics and ML tooling, I have a hard time seeing past languages that can match the performance of Fortran/C/etc and are able to expose a C ABI. Because those languages let you write one central, highly-optimized implementation that everyone can access from their favorite higher-level language.

Erlang/Elixir and Chez Scheme are backed by large companies.

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