[banashark]

I understand where you're coming from, but I'd challenge your dismissal of that note by noting how seemingly powerful a large ecosystem of available packages is when onboarding people to an ecosystem.

I don't think Scala, Kotlin, or Clojure would have had as much adoption if they hadn't had access to the JVM ecosystem of libraries available.

While it's not the only benefit, I think one could just point at the usage of OCaml as the alternative to F#. While both are in the lower percentages of language popularity/usage, I've worked with at least 50 (dozens lol) people who were paid to write production F#.

[djtango]

After reading Paul Biggar's experiences with OCaml when building darklang, and the importance of ecosystem when building distributed systems in the cloud, I don't think I'd ever build a business on a non-hosted functional language.

There are some hefty businesses built on top of OCaml so it definitely can be done, but it sounds too expensive to get a small business up and running if the code itself isn't the product.

So that basically leaves Scala, Clojure and F#

[cosmos64]

Depends on the use case.

Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam are hosted on their own platform, and lots of use cases can be covered that way.

Also, Flix is a thing, and some Scheme/CommonLisp/StandardML implementations compile to C.

Ecosystem there. Purescript, Gleam and others compile to JS.

Oh, and WebAssembly becomes valuable as compilation target as well.

Also: Kotlin is almost a functional first language like F#