Comment by bmitc
3 months ago
I find it interesting how the software industry has done everything it can to ignore F#. This is me just lamenting how I always come back to it as the best general purpose language.
3 months ago
I find it interesting how the software industry has done everything it can to ignore F#. This is me just lamenting how I always come back to it as the best general purpose language.
Probably the intersection of people who (a) want an advanced ML-style language and (b) are interested in a CLR-based language is very small. But also, doesn't it do some weird thing where it matters in what order the files are included in the compilation? I remember being interested in F# but being turned off by that, and maybe some other weird details.
That ordering is generally considered a feature to keep dependencies and modules well-organized.
To be quite blunt, that sounds like a rationalization. To me "well-organized" would mean that the order conclusively does not matter. Otherwise I feel like I'm eventually going to end up randomly rejiggering the ordering until the compiler stops whining.
I don’t want to use a language with unknown ecosystem. If I need a library to do X, I’m confident I can find it for Go, Java, Python etc. But I don’t know about F#.
I also don’t want to use a language with questionable hireability.
Haven't used F# too much myself but one of the strong points is because it shares the CLR with C# you can use any of the many packages meant for C# and it'll work because of the shared runtime.
That's all part of my point, really.
To within a rounding error of zero, I don't think anyone outside Windows devs truly expects Microsoft to maintain .NET on other platforms, so it's not really an option in many (most?) fields.
They've effectively dropped it a couple times in the past, and while they're currently putting effort in, the company as a whole does not seem to care about stuff like this beyond brief bursts of attention to try to win back developer mindshare, before going back to abandonment. It's what Microsoft is rather well known for.
.NET is one of the easiest to install and robust cross-platform systems out there. It's actually very impressive. I don't know of a single other platform that nails cross-platform so well.
The effort of .NET Framework to .NET Core to .NET 5 and now up to .NET 9 is well over a decade long of steady and increasing progress.
Compared to OpenJDK, dotnet:
1. only supports the three main operating systems and two architectures (or four if we're stretching things and being very generous)
2. large parts of it still don't work anywhere but Windows (UI being the primary one)
3. the level and quality of official tooling provided for Linux and macOS is incomparable to their Windows offerings
No, its cross-platform story is far from the best we have.
https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/HotSpot/Ports
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> To within a rounding error of zero, I don't think anyone outside Windows devs truly expects Microsoft to maintain .NET on other platforms, so it's not really an option in many (most?) fields.
This is provably wrong, unless you want to insist despite the facts because that's what your social bubble tells you to do.
The most popular deployment target for .NET is Linux: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/telemetry
Equating whatever else MS is up to with the way .NET evolves and is managed is no different to equating YouTube and Golang.
People use Microsoft open source stuff, definitely. It's fairly often decent or better.
But Microsoft's most consistent legacy across its entire existence has been Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Any Linux-supporting project is directly opposed to their core business, aside from Azure - if it starts becoming a threat, they'll turn it into a way to force people onto their other money-makers.
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Huh? Usually languages that are ”ignored” turns out to be for reasons such as poor or proprietary tooling. As an ignorant bystander, how are things like
Cross compilation, package manager and associated infrastructure, async io (epoll, io_uring etc), platform support, runtime requirements, FFI support, language server, etc.
Are a majority of these things available with first party (or best in class) integrated tooling that are trivial to set up on all big three desktop platforms?
For instance, can I compile an F# lib to an iOS framework, ideally with automatically generated bindings for C, C++ or Objective C? Can I use private repo (ie github) urls with automatic overrides while pulling deps?
Generally, the answer to these questions for – let’s call it ”niche” asterisk – languages, are ”there is a GitHub project with 15 stars last updated 3 years ago that maybe solves that problem”.
There are tons of amazing languages (or at the very least, underappreciated language features) that didn’t ”make it” because of these boring reasons.
My entire point is that the older and grumpier I get, the less the language itself matters. Sure, I hate it when my favorite elegant feature is missing, but at the end of the day it’s easy to work around. IMO the navel gazing and bikeshedding around languages is vastly overhyped in software engineering.
F# compiler is cross os and allows cross compilation (dotnet build --runtime xxx), its packaged in most Linux distros as dotnet.
Ok that helps! So where does F# shine? Any particular domains?
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It's been around for a long time and sponsored by Microsoft. I don't know its exact status, but the only reason for it to lack in any of those areas is lack of will.