[dbrigg]

  > We will enable and encourage strong community participation in F# by continuing
  > to build the necessary infrastructure and tooling to complement community
  > contributions. We will make F# the best-tooled functional language on the
  > market, by improving the language and tooling experience, removing road blocks
  > for contributions, and addressing pain points to narrow the experience gap with
  > C# and VB. As new language features appear in C#, we will ensure that they also
  > interoperate well with F#. F# will continue to target platforms that are
  > important to its community.

Reading between the lines this says that further development of F# will be dropped. They're handing it over to the community for plausible deniability. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like a very sad day for functional programmers.

[MadsTorgersen]

Hey, I didn't write anything between the lines! :-)

Don't worry: We're not "handing F# over to the community"! It always had a strong community participation, and continues to. It's a fabulous collaboration. This post is not an attempt to signal a change to our strategy for F#, and if anything should be read as a commitment to F#.

We're currently integrating F# more deeply with Roslyn, which should lead to an awesome bump in tooling quality.

[dbrigg]

Thank you and I apologize.

[hacker_9]

That's the exact opposite of what it means. Additionally F# already is the best-tooled functional language on the market as far as I can tell, so I look forward to whatever is coming to make it even better.

[dbrigg]

If that were true, why is their primary commitment to "encourage the community" and "build a forum" (my paraphrasing)? It triggers my doublespeak detector. If they were developing the language they'd have put "language development" at the top of the list.

Call me skeptical. Microsoft are no stranger to killing off their products.

[WorldMaker]

Because F# was Microsoft's first open source language to even allow community involvement in its design processes and accept PRs directly from the community (C#, VB, and Typescript have all subsequently followed in F#'s trailblazed path here), there is a strong sense of not wanting to dictate the language direction and instead build the language as a community effort. It's been such a point of pride in the F# community that so much of F#'s development has been out in the open and a community effort, that are good reasons Microsoft would want to make sure its language was inclusive of that and respectful to that history.

[hacker_9]

Because that is what they have been doing with C# and VB for the last couple of years? The compilers are open source and anyone can write a language feature request on GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

[sitharus]

F# has always been a research/community project, that's why the tooling isn't up to scratch with c# and VB.

This signals F# is becoming more of a core language with better tool integration, but is keeping its community driven roots.

[Tsarbomb]

I really hope you are right. The tooling around F# is the only reason it doesn't explode in popularity.

If Microsoft starts to treat it as a first class citizen with respect to their .NET Core direction, then the future is very bright.

[sitharus]

I hope so as well. I love F# but using it in a corporate environment is hard due to its second tier status.