Hmmm... Is F# a good alternative? I already have a ton of experience with .NET and C#. I'm thinking about doing a deep dive into functional programming and don't want to waste my time with something that has a major fundamental flaw.
It's not a fundamental flaw it's a change. Basically in the early days of Haskell they decided to make much of the prelude (the builtins) work on the concrete type "list" rather than on more abstract types for beginner simplicity, with more abstract "interfaces" like Foldable not shown upfront, with the attendant duplication as each function of the prelude now has a more abstract duplicate somewhere else.
The FTP change reverses this and alters the prelude to operate on abstract types rather than concrete ones, this somewhat increases the initial learning experience[0] but it doesn't really change the language itself.
For C# equivalence, imagine if all the most easily accessible functions operated on the concrete `List` to avoid having to introduce interfaces and all had duplicates taking an IEnumerable instead (that doesn't quite work as C# uses methods but there you are).
And surely if that's a "fundamental flaw" of Haskell, you've wasted your time with C# and its fundamental flaw of non-generic System.Collections
[0] for complete beginners with no concept of abstract types I guess? For Haskell beginners coming from other languages it doesn't seem like a big issue, just a matter of how abstract types which is already an issue between languages anyway e.g. where Haskell has Foldable C# has IEnumerable, Ruby has Enumerable, Java and Python have Iterable, ...
Thanks! Considering 'List' is one of the few structures of FP I understand, that makes actual sense.
I would guess that Ocaml might be better in unixy environment while sharing similar features to F#?
Core language works fine and no dependence on VS. There are packages for most distros. Libraries outside the core language are a bit hit and miss, but you'll find libraries for most things you want to do.
If you have a Windows project where you've been NuGetting stuff from all over the place, porting might be a bit of a pain.
Besides, you would also be asserting that F# does not have that flaw. I don't believe you have that evidence either.
That said, F# is pretty nice. It's opt-in laziness for .NET compatibility but laziness is pervasive. There's no forced purity though. On the plus side it's easy to interact with anything that has .NET bindings.