[candl]

I have been debating whether to learn Scala or F# in my spare time. F# seems to be the more pragmatic choice. Doesn't go the insane way of FP that Scala does with complicated libraries or convoluted inheritance hierarchies. The Scala community seems more divided than the F# one with multiple competing ecosystems/libraries for achieving the same thing. My interest lies in webdev/backend and F# seems to be an obvious choice with asp.net and it's supplanting libraries. Not sure how Scala fares, but i guess it's not the primary use case for it. On the surface I kind of like the syntax of Scala, it's very familiar but I fear that I would get more frustrated the deeper I would dig because eventually you have to integrate other people's code and the way most of it is written looks to be like haskell in disguise. Not really sure about the pros/cons.

[JackMorgan]

I've used Scala, Clojure, Haskell, and F#. I'd say F# does a great job of providing a happy middle path between the strict side effect management of Haskell and the advanced OOP features of Scala. It also brings the well-designed ASPNET CORE stack.

If I was starting from scratch and just wanted to learn, I'd say you'll learn plenty from any of them. Haskell has the most to teach about purity in FP, Scala the most about OOP, and Clojure the most about metaprogramming.

F# has the most to offer for just getting things done quickly. It is a language of practical compromises. It's not the most pure, it doesn't bring the most advanced OOP, and it's metaprogramming is tricky. However F# is what I grab first when I want to build production software quickly and safely.

[jmfldn]

Veteran Scala dev here. I'm not here to convince you to choose it over F# but I can tell you that it's a beautiful language. Scala is used heavily for backend web dev, in fact, it's all I use it for.

Don't worry about advanced concepts, you'll get to those when / if you need them. They have their uses but it depends on what you're working on. I think many people just succumb to the blub paradox too quickly with these sorts of languages. It's a real shame.

It's honestly overstated how hard it is. I started as a junior dev with Scala and was highly productive within months. I don't think there's anything special about me. I was highly motivated by my love for the language I guess.