Isn't that because F# failed to win any significant market share? I think F#'s problem is that C# is too good and this was true even in 2010, its not like Scala vs. Java in 2010.
I worked with F# for about 3 years and the sentiment of most F# developers after using it in anger, including myself, is "I don't want to go back to C#". In my opinion, it didn't win significant market share because Microsoft didn't want it to. This goes even further back than 2010. I don't know if it's because F# was open source and C# was not, as Microsoft's FOSS stance hadn't really come around yet till what, 2016?
F# is way nicer than C# (and Clojure is still way nicer than Java)
And I dont think F# failed, I just think it needs to find a way to hide C# and OOP better
But the language is doing fairly well, tons of educational resources, tons of videos on youtube , several nice projects on github, solid vs code mode, it is part of .net , but still a lot can be improved, and microsoft is far from abandoning, C# is one of MS flagship products , F# is not a flagship product
And I also think that Don Syme is a lot more active working for F# and promoting it, than Rich Hickey is currently working for Clojure
Big F# fan here, but i don't really "doing fairly well" is a fair assessment of the F# ecosystem right now.
> microsoft is far from abandoning
Might has well. When you look at the resources actually being deployed for F#, it's clear that MSFT either don't care or don't really have plan for F#. Most of the work is done by the community. The number of actual paid/full time MSFT dev on F# is very limited.
The tooling is extremely limited, there is no official F# libraries for pretty much any MSFT and azure services (have to relie on C# libs.)
In leetcode where the have C# (so already have the infra to run .net stuff, and language like elixir and racket (so they do have more niche language), they still don't have F#.
The salvation for F# would come from finding a killer app, something akin to pytorch/numbpy or rails.
Maybe, and it's a good case study to compare F# vs. C# with Java vs. Scala to understand why Scala seems to have higher penetration than F#.
In my opinion, and I mean this in the broadest way possible, the average C# developer is probably less motivated to learn a new language than the average Java developer. That's because C# developers are prescribed by Microsoft what to do, and Microsoft could deliver a productive-enough experience with C# + .NET Framework + Visual Studio for a long long time.
Java's fractured IDE story and runtime (OpenJDK vs. HotSpot) I think lead to a higher concentration of programming language people looking at the JVM as a viable target to build a better experience on top of, so we got Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, (anyone remember Xtend?), IDEA, Eclipse, etc...
The bazaar produced and embraced a functional programming language whereas the cathedral treats F# as thunderdome for new C# features.
Reading C# code makes me shudder. It is so hard to read with all the brackets, spacing, indentation levels, and overall verboseness. I honestly don't know how people do it.
F# can do OOP just as well if not better than C#, and F# is anywhere from 2-10 times more concise than C#.
That being said, the mistake of Microsoft was viewing F# as a competitor to and research lab for C# and the community for viewing and selling it as a replacement for C#.
What Microsoft and the community should have done is treated F# as a competitor and replacement for Python from the start.
That is what F# folks tried to pivot the language as of latest, only to be sidestepped yet again by Microsoft, when they hired Guido and managed to be the company that changed his mind regarding CPython optimizations.
Also see the development effort Microsoft spends on Python across all their IDEs and what F# gets.
