[pjmlp]

F# also tried to pivot into data science of lately, only to have Microsoft themselves jumping into Python and being the entity that finally managed to convince Guido and others to invest into improving CPython's performance, and possible JIT integration.

Basically having the pivot efforts being sabotaged by the same company.

[WorldMaker]

Microsoft has always been a polyglot company. They also invested heavily in R and I believe even contributed some things to Julia.

I don't think the pivot entirely failed, there's definitely a small niche for "data science, but it needs to run in .NET" and F# still to my understanding fills it well. It's a very small niche and I don't expect to hear a lot of data scientists directly training for it, but there's a lot of advantages in places that use the Azure stack, for instance, for faster/better/more integrated data science when done with F#.

F# would probably need a lot more investment in dynamic types to truly attract a lot of data scientist attention. (Though the .NET DLR still exists and could use some fresh, modern love.)

Relatedly, I appreciate a lot that Microsoft's polyglot approach helped standardize the ONNX runtime, and even if the data scientists I'm working with prefer Python or R, I can still take ONNX models they build and run them in a C# or F# library with very little sweat.

[progmetaldev]

I think if Microsoft would have continued to invest in projects such as IronRuby and IronPython, we'd be much further along in integrating different paradigms in a way that feels more natural, while also continuing to grow the DLR (for both features and performance).

[progmetaldev]

I am only scratching the very surface of data science, but coming from .NET 1.0 and just starting to learn Python, I'm still finding it far easier to use Python for these tasks. It's most likely just the library ecosystem, and I'm hoping that Microsoft continues to add officially supported libraries to .NET for these tasks. ML.NET feels very foreign to me compared to using other libraries in Python, even as a beginner in Python (although I have experience with various languages, but only minimal experience in functional languages, mostly F#).