[sph]

I agree on the underrated part.

My theory as an outsider: F# is strongly tied to the Windows world, the corporate world, where a conservative approach is always preferable, on your tech stack and if you need to hire peons coding all day. The corporate world isn't leaving OOP anytime soon, because it's what 95% of engineers focus on, the silent majority which do not frequent HN or play with functional languages in their weekends. The corporate world runs on Java and C#.

If F# had been released in the open-source, flashy and bustling world of Linux and macOS developers, it would have had a much greater success.

I know you can run F# on Linux, but just like running Swift, it feels like outsiders I wouldn't want to bet my business on if I were a Linux-only shop (which I am), however nice it feels. Also a decade ago when it had a chance to take root, Microsoft was still the Embrace Extend Extinguish company. It's not good enough to risk it, just like I'm not gonna use SQL Server for anything.

[pc86]

I am admittedly biased, because although I started programming recreationally in the LAMP-stack world of mid-aughts fame, a huge portion of my professional career has been in C# and the .NET stack.

I think you are grossly overestimating the degree to which the programming language you choose to use to solve a business problem constitutes "betting your business on." How would your business fundamentally change if your first 10k lines of code was in F# as opposed to Go, or Java, or Python, or TypeScript? These are also all languages I've been paid to use, and have used in anger, and with the exception of Java were all learned on the job. This comment in general has big "M$ bad" vibes and if you take those pieces out I'm not sure what the actual criticism is (maybe there is none)?

[vladvasiliu]

Aside from the EEE quip, I didn't catch any "M$ bad" vide in GP's post.

I think the situation is clear-cut: until recently, you couldn't really run .net on anything else than Windows, so the only people using it were those already invested in the ecosystem.

Among the people invested in the windows ecosystem, many (most ?) are large "non-tech" companies who hire people who mostly see their jobs as a meal ticket. These people don't have the inclination (for lack of curiosity, or time, or whatever reason, doesn't matter) to look into "interesting" things. They mostly handle whatever tickets they have and call it a day. Fiddling with some language that has a different paradigm wouldn't be seen as a good use of their time on the clock by corporate, or during their time off work by themselves, since they'd rather spend that time some other way.

Hence, F# never really got any traction.

[sph]

That's for coming in my defense. You are right. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I also don't hate them.

It's pretty simple, really. I am a Linux engineer, and it is not a great investment of time and money for me to get into .NET. I knew F# was cool, but is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on? It makes no business sense at all.

[vladvasiliu]

> is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on?

I'm not a software engineer myself, nor a Windows person, so I don't know the specifics, but FWIW, my client runs production .Net code of the C# variety on Linux, connected to pgsql. It's some kind of web service for checking people's tickets (think airport gates where you scan your ticket to enter), so not exactly a toy, even though it's nowhere near unicorn-scale. It seems to work fine, in the sense that I've never heard anyone complain about anything related to this setup. No "works for me but is borken in prod" or "thingy is wonky on Linux but OK on Windows so have to build expensive workaround".

The devs run VisualStudio (non Code) on their Windows laptops. Code is then built and packaged by Azure Pipelines in a container and sent to AWS to be run on ECS.

[sph]

I do get it. .NET now works pretty well on Linux.

But it never was a tier 1 platform during its growth. So most non-Windows devs put their focus on other platforms. There is nothing wrong with that.

I could learn .NET now, but I don't really have an interest to do so at this point; Also, the devs you talk about are on Windows, using their tier 1 IDE (Visual Studio) that only runs on Windows, which is my point exactly.

[vladvasiliu]

That's a fair point. Tooling is an important aspect of a language, at least for me. I don't know what the VS Code on Linux experience is like for .net.

I tried to dip my toes into F# out of curiosity, and it worked by following some tutorial and VS Code. But it did seem somewhat bare bones. Although I'll admit I'm spoiled by Rust and IntelliJ.

[btreecat]

Working for an org who bet on a mix of scala, python, and typescript, I can tell you which languages are being bet on for the rewritten services, and which language is getting in the way of getting things done.

[Taikonerd]

Am I guessing correctly that Scala is "getting in the way of getting things done"?

[btreecat]

That's a Texas sized 10-4

[trympet]

What's so bad about Scala? I've only used it for hobby projects myself.

[btreecat]

Using it in a context where you need to make money, it's a bad bet. Fine for academic ideas and such things, but really hard to build a business around. And the tooling, community, libs, and docs show how it just can't punch the same weight as other languages when at the end of the day you need to get shit done.

[mnsc]

Care to elaborate? Are there any big frameworks in the mix that might have gone from oss to commercial?

[btreecat]

We have both Akka and http4s in use, and are migrating to http4s for those services. We need to do more things more quickly with fewer hands. TS and Python are just easier and better tooled for the majority of our (CRUD) work.

[fud101]

scala is being rewritten in .. typescript?

[rapind]

dotnet compiles in general are slow AF on macs, and F# really stood out as the slowest last time I give it a kick.

F# looks wonderful, but unless you’re already in the MS ecosystem, dotnet just feels bad and out of place. And I guess if you are already in the MS ecosystem you’re using C#.

[robertlagrant]

> This comment in general has big "M$ bad" vibes and if you take those pieces out I'm not sure what the actual criticism is (maybe there is none)?

As with almost all "vibes"-related comments, this doesn't hold up. There isn't any criticism; just a positing that the sort of corporate, process-heavy companies that will major on Microsoft programming languages will be the last ones to want to try functional programming languages.

[akra]

Would agree with this. I don't think the language choice, is as massive bet on the business as people think. I've seen much more niche and ancient langs without an ecosystem (no libraries, no SDK's to popular products, etc) build very profitable products. I would see these languages as a much greater risk.

As long as it has a base capability (libraries, maturity) and when people join they can be productive with it in a month or so then the risk is pretty low. For F# most .NET developers, even Node developers IMO will get used to F# relatively quickly. From my anecdotal experience with a number of languages its probably one of the easiest to onboard out of the FP langs balancing the FP methodology while trying to be practical/pragmatic. It has a large ecosystem via the .NET platform and supplements it with FP specific F# libraries where pragmatic to do so.

[tstrimple]

When it's time to scale out your team and now you're trying to hire dozens of F# developers it starts to matter a lot more. You can throw a rock and hit a Java developer. I hate the language, but finding other people who can be productive in it is trivial compared to F#.

[pc86]

One of the common threads among companies I've worked at which I would consider "successful" is that they don't really classify developers based on what languages they've used before. If you're a good programmer you can become a net positive in almost any language in a few weeks to a few months, and productive within the first year. Some of the worst companies I've worked for were the type who would toss a resume in the trash because they had 1 year of experience in $LANG from a few years ago and not the "have used it for 3 of the last 3 years" they wanted.

[tstrimple]

I think it depends on what you mean by "successful". Surely multi-billion dollar financial organizations are by at least some definition successful. They are a complete shit show from a tech standpoint. They are so large they cannot effectively manage specialist developer staff outside of very narrow niches. Standardization when you've got thousands of developers across hundreds of products matters. Maybe some "successful" startup can make things work when they are small. But you'll find they start to standardize when they hit real scale.

[paddim8]

.NET has great Linux support nowadays though. I only use Linux and use .NET extensively and have no complaints