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by edgyswingset 3154 days ago
As a sometimes-user of F#, I’m quite happy not caring about a dead-end technology like UWP and .NET Native, thank you very much. I’m glad everyone else seems to agree about that, too.
2 comments

How things are going, I bet those dead-end technologies have a brighter future than F#, specially when I see those Microsoft bashing comments.

If it comes to be, lets see how long F# survives without Microsoft support.

Microsoft bashing? Where did I do that?

I run a few things on .NET Core today and it’s great. I’ll probably runs some things in Azure soon enough. I just think UWP has no future because its primary device type (Windows phone) is dead, and it hasn’t seen any uptake in the enterprise to replace Winforms and WPF. F# seems just fine to me, and it’s supported for my app type. Perhaps you need to rethink your choices in development technologies.

I am speaking about the tone on F# tweets and on Github coments regarding Windows, UWP and .NET Native.

I did rethink my choices in technology, F# is not worth my time for production code anymore.

As was stated before, UWPs primary device type is every Windows 10 device.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/75lgti/announcing...

You don't seem to understand what UWP is about.

UWP is the primary Windows client application platform going forward.

https://np.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/75mc1m/announcing_uw...

All this FUD and hostility from the F# community (including the Fable devs) towards UWP, or anything that's of interest to most Windows and C# developers making the switch, is why F# will never be popular.

And for most people who need to have their code running on anything else than Windows, F# and .NET wouldn't be their first choice anyway, given that there are plenty of better alternatives around, like Haskell, Scala, ReasonML, OCaml etc.

Replying to check back in one year. Good luck chasing Microsoft's moving cheese!
Nothing is being moved. UWP has been here since the dawn of Windows 10, which evolved from WinRT, going back to Windows 8, and is constantly being extended with new APIs.
I guess I don't understand... you've only written apps targeting UWP since what year? And previous experience was with what?

It's nice when you're where the cheese is currently at, that's not what I'm talking about though.

I do hope for your sake you don't wind up in the next lifeboat after the Silverlight crew, I really genuinely do. Good luck!

I've been holding of targeting UWP, until proper F# support.

I have experience with plenty of languages and technologies, including C, C++, Rust, Scala, OCaml, Haskell, Clojure, Elm, Idris, WinForms, WPF, DirectX and dabbled with Silverlight. Migrating from WPF or Silverlight towards UWP shouldn't be a problem.

F# has been my favorite language since 2008, but the hostile anti-UWP, anti-Windows community, compounded with the lack of abstraction features such as ML functors, higher-kinded types, type-classes and terrible modern Windows client support, are driving me away from it.

UWP is pretty mature now and all modern default 1st party Windows apps and critical UI components such as start menu, action center and settings rely on it, and more is being migrated towards it all the time, there is no sign of UWP going away anytime soon.

> there is no sign of UWP going away anytime soon

Except for Windows Phone getting killed, which was the _main_ device type for UWP. The Windows app store is the same graveyard that it was in late 2015 when the announcements around new Windows Phones piqued my curiosity. It looks like that's simply not a thing anymore. I'm betting my money on Xamarin and the browser for a client application, not UWP. There's just no point to it.