Ask HN: Why do you think F# is not more popular, even within the .NET ecosystem?

9 points·soulbadguy··6 comments

My last experience with the language date from a couple.of years ago, overall it was kind pleasant : light wait syntax, goodish tooling and nice async programming support. Fast forward today, I wanted to explore asp.net and most of the example are in C# and the overall community/support for F# seems lower than say Scala or kotlin. What happened ?

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It's my understanding that Microsoft themselves somewhat quickly dropped off from promoting it that much. So from their perspective it was probably considered a mistake to anoint it as an official first-class .NET language, due to the resource allocation entailed to keep that status going.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/langua...

It's not promoted well. Relying on open source contributions to the ecosystem to keep it going also removes its "first-class" branding.

I've been using F# as a cross-platform Python/Bash/Powershell replacement. I've never heard or read about anyone else doing this, but it works super well in this use case for me.

People seem scared of functional programming languages, seeing them as difficult and impractical. I tried (and failed) learning Haskell three times, but F# makes writing very little code to accomplish a whole bunch easy, due to being able to use .NET libraries, and there's not really that much syntax to learn and the tooling (Ionide, Rider, VS) is great, e.g. run/debug works out of the box.

Many functional features of F# made their way into C#.

The F#-community is small, but thriving with enthusiastic devs that are working hard behind the scenes.

Check out these examples - https://ionide.io/ - - Discord: https://discord.gg/fsharp-196693847965696000

C# IDE experience is simply godlike.

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