Comment by madarcho
3 months ago
Where is this worry coming from? (I'm curious, not shutting it down)
I might be biased from having worked with production F#, but it feels more like functional is making its way into C#, as the general industry sees value in functional principles. So F# feels like its more here to stay?
Doesn't it feel like the functional stuff is coming into C# so that F# can disappear? Pure speculation on my part but doesn't seem unreasonable.
C# has incomplete and often compromised versions of the constructs F# mostly took from OCaml, and as you extend those exhaustive guarantees towards formal verification you bump into F*.
C#s adoption of language features shows their utility but they’re not a replacement, per se. Without a clear functional answer in certain language and parallel computing scenarios MS would be ignored. Scala and Kotlin are comparable answers to comparable pressures on the JVM, and even keeping pace there with new and exciting tools/libraries requires some proper functional representation on the .Net platform.
F# will disappear when/if those other languages do, and already has lots of what C# is chasing with a more elegant syntax. It inherits VM and project improvements from C#, so the biggest threat to long term investment is something like the crippling changes made to FSharp Interactive (FSI), during the .Net Core transition. Otherwise it seems to be in a safe place for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft is still supporting VB.NET, Windows Forms/WPF, and to a lesser extent VBA. I doubt F# is going away anytime soon.
Supporting as in maintenance mode, at least VB.NET. Thankfully F# is more community driven, but the CLR ecosystem is definitely getting C#-centric in the use of idioms and features from newer C# versions, which increasingly affects F# interop while they catch up.
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The C# team admits to looking at how F# features work, but also keeps trying to make it clear that C# doesn't have a goal of entire eating F#.
C# still doesn't see itself as a functional programming language, even as it has added so many features. It may never get first-class currying or the broader ideas like generalized computation expressions, for instance. It certainly won't get F#'s cleaner syntax with fewer mandatory semicolons and whitespace nesting rather than curly brackets.
F# probably isn't going to disappear for a lot of similar reasons that GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) didn't disappear when F# was started (nor when key contributors left Microsoft). F# often already sees more outside open source contributors than contributions from Microsoft employees.
They killed off VB, which if I recall the announcement correctly, noted that it statistically had a larger user base (by Microsoft metrics) than F#. There are a number of companies relying on F# for critical operations and MS has some use of F# internally which I understand has no plans of replacement, which helps balance out the fear.
I was curious so I googled. Best I can tell it is still supported, but perhaps stagnant?
Very little, as in fingers in hand, little in Azure