[irateswami]

I fail to see what problem F# solves that is not already done as well or better in Go, Rust, or Python, coupled with the wide acceptance and/or hype among other developers for those languages.

[bgorman]

Type safety, expressiveness, consistency. Once you use an ML, it can feel like all other languages are stuck in the 70s.

[shpongled]

I really wish Standard ML had a bigger (I'd settle for active) community, a package system, and modern IDE support.

Rust feels like the closest thing to me in terms of overall practicality/ease of use.

[bmitc]

I feel all one really needs is a Lisp/Scheme and an ML. Imagine if software engineering had coalesced on these two!

[bayesian_horse]

I agree somewhat. F# is a decent language, even in some aspects "better" than Go, Rust or Python, but it is late.

I think F# does have a much stronger "in the browser" game. Yes, even a bit more than Rust, if you consider whole web applications and not just performance critical modules.

And some people and companies are extremely stuck in Dot.Net...

[lbriner]

You are implying that people that use .net are stuck. I would say it is hands-down the best general purpose web programming language and also the goto for programming Windows apps.

Sure I can write stuff in Go or Rust or Python but I don't see that any of those offer anything significantly better than .Net, including the support level, the quality of the IDE and even, God forbid, half-decent performance.

Sure I would choose another language for something that had to be super fast or perhaps headless but otherwise I would choose .Net every time.

Disclaimer, I have professionally used Java, PHP, C, C++ and C# but not Go or Rust.

[bayesian_horse]

I'd really question the claim on C#/.Net being the best Web programming language. Yes, you can eek out a performance benefit over Python, but many people prefer Python and its frameworks over C#. It's also proven to be a viable road for startups.

IDEs for Python have improved a lot, and the more passionate Pythonists might fault C# for actually needing IDE tooling for being bearable...

I can see why you would prefer C# over PHP, C++ and Java for Web programming though.

[bmitc]

> F# is a decent language, even in some aspects "better" than Go, Rust or Python, but it is late.

F# came out well before Go and Rust and well in time to compete with Python's popularity. There were other factors that affected its adoption.

[de_keyboard]

None of the examples you give encourage (or even properly support) statically-typed functional programming with immutable data. The purpose of F# is to be an FP language with an emphasis on getting things done.

I think you should look again :)