F# seem to be in abandon-ware state
the creator of F# moved to another job as his primary work
the forum and community are very dry
Nothing interesting being created in F#
As much as I had high hopes for F#
I think its safe at this point, to not pursuit it any further
.Net is C#
If you want an Ocaml like language, that is not Ocaml, your best bet is Rescript
and that being said, Rescript is probably more of a competitor to gleam, since gleam also have javascript as a target
The language is still ahead of C#, and still receiving features and keeping up by and large with the .NET ecosystem. Tbh I don't get the sheer negativity; the same thing could be said for Gleam or any other functional language these days tbh especially with AI coming along w.r.t long term support. Eventually things just work and are mostly complete; things don't have to get reinvented or get better forever.
> As much as I had high hopes for F# I think its safe at this point, to not pursuit it any further
I find this attitude interesting; you wanted it to be more than it was. I don't have high hopes for any language; other than it building my software which it and many others can do. Right tool for right job. I'm not attached to my code, other than if it can be maintained, changed, has sane defaults/guardrails to introduce less defects, etc. F# can do this, as many others. Interestingly I've seen the same attitude eventually happen to all languages of this class other than Rust; Scala, OCaml, etc are in similar positions.
Funnily enough Opus/CC has a number of times for my projects has suggested Rust, and if that doesn't work (too much for the team) went F# even over Java based langs assuming domain modelling code and the need for more perf (e.g. value types, and other stuff) without explicit prompting. Its then generated fsx scripts to run experiments, etc that seem to be more reliable than the default Python ones it runs (package errors and static typing fixes mostly). `dotnet fsi` fits well into the agentic workflow.
> Rescript and that being said, Rescript is probably more of a competitor to gleam
Depends on your target. F# at least has a backdoor into the C# ecosystem - from a risk perspective that makes it more palatable. New languages have an initial "excitement" about them; but generally they are just tools.
Pick something that fits your team and build. F# does work, and so do many other tools. In the age of AI IMO the ecosystem and guardrails for the AI matter more than the language and its syntax IMO other than readability. In this regard F# still is "less risky" with its .NET interop.
Wake up and smell the coffee: fsharp is dead. Look at the release notes of fsharp. It's laughable for a major version update. It's maintained by like 5 people working in eastern Europe and they only do maintenance updates basically. C# is getting all its features and DotNet is basically c# oriented anyway. So even in the past you had to learn C# to program in F#
I would assert that Microsoft's management always behaved as if they repented to have added F# to VS 2010, with all the maintenance guarantees it implies, throughout the years they have searched how to sell it.
Nowadays CLR has effectively changed meaning to C# Language Runtime, and ironically the JVM is more lively as the original goal of the CLR back in 2001.
F# seem to be in abandon-ware state the creator of F# moved to another job as his primary work the forum and community are very dry
Nothing interesting being created in F#
As much as I had high hopes for F# I think its safe at this point, to not pursuit it any further
.Net is C#
If you want an Ocaml like language, that is not Ocaml, your best bet is Rescript and that being said, Rescript is probably more of a competitor to gleam, since gleam also have javascript as a target
The language is still ahead of C#, and still receiving features and keeping up by and large with the .NET ecosystem. Tbh I don't get the sheer negativity; the same thing could be said for Gleam or any other functional language these days tbh especially with AI coming along w.r.t long term support. Eventually things just work and are mostly complete; things don't have to get reinvented or get better forever.
> As much as I had high hopes for F# I think its safe at this point, to not pursuit it any further
I find this attitude interesting; you wanted it to be more than it was. I don't have high hopes for any language; other than it building my software which it and many others can do. Right tool for right job. I'm not attached to my code, other than if it can be maintained, changed, has sane defaults/guardrails to introduce less defects, etc. F# can do this, as many others. Interestingly I've seen the same attitude eventually happen to all languages of this class other than Rust; Scala, OCaml, etc are in similar positions.
Funnily enough Opus/CC has a number of times for my projects has suggested Rust, and if that doesn't work (too much for the team) went F# even over Java based langs assuming domain modelling code and the need for more perf (e.g. value types, and other stuff) without explicit prompting. Its then generated fsx scripts to run experiments, etc that seem to be more reliable than the default Python ones it runs (package errors and static typing fixes mostly). `dotnet fsi` fits well into the agentic workflow.
> Rescript and that being said, Rescript is probably more of a competitor to gleam
Depends on your target. F# at least has a backdoor into the C# ecosystem - from a risk perspective that makes it more palatable. New languages have an initial "excitement" about them; but generally they are just tools.
Pick something that fits your team and build. F# does work, and so do many other tools. In the age of AI IMO the ecosystem and guardrails for the AI matter more than the language and its syntax IMO other than readability. In this regard F# still is "less risky" with its .NET interop.
Wake up and smell the coffee: fsharp is dead. Look at the release notes of fsharp. It's laughable for a major version update. It's maintained by like 5 people working in eastern Europe and they only do maintenance updates basically. C# is getting all its features and DotNet is basically c# oriented anyway. So even in the past you had to learn C# to program in F#
I would assert that Microsoft's management always behaved as if they repented to have added F# to VS 2010, with all the maintenance guarantees it implies, throughout the years they have searched how to sell it.
Nowadays CLR has effectively changed meaning to C# Language Runtime, and ironically the JVM is more lively as the original goal of the CLR back in 2001.