[magnumkarter]

For me, I only got into .NET because of F#, and even then I pretend C# doesn't exist. I tried learning OCaml, it has cool features, like parametric modules and GADTs. But I always ran into the issue of irreproducible builds. This didn't happened in F#.

I eventually tried F# because it was close enough to OCaml and while I was learning OCaml I always referred to this site http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com

I'm definitely an F# evangelist at work, but we are not a .NET shop. But I was would say that the introduction of ML features in other languages, (Swift, Rust) are good for F# evangelism, because it makes these concepts more familiar. I think the focus should be on moving F# away from .NET because F# itself, it is much more accessible that its cousins OCaml and Haskell. And if Microsoft won't give proper support, the community should move to other platforms. Some discussions are already happening here https://github.com/fsharp/fssf-ask-the-board/issues/4

[pjmlp]

The difference being that Apple is quite vocal that Swift is the future of app development on their platforms, while Microsoft is trying to push UWP as the future of Windows apps (supported languages VB, C#, C++ and JavaScript).

[yawaramin]

UWP supports JavaScript? Cool, in that case a bunch of transpilers should work (once bindings are written) ... people can just use their preferred languages: OCaml/BuckleScript, F#/Fable, TypeScript, PureScript, et al.

I've actually written and run JScript scripts on Windows Script Host with BuckleScript, it's really nifty. You write strongly-typed code and get a JS artifact that can run on your target platform. For the curious, an example: https://github.com/yawaramin/wsh-bs-test