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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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maxxxxx·

Agreed. I have tried using F# in my company but gave up after a while. Reasons:

- it's hard to hire people

- most libraries are written for OO style so most code will be written OO style

- most sample code is written in C#

- C# is a pretty nice language. Does F# really provide an advantage?

- will MS abandon F#?

I really would like to see a clear case for F#. When you consider factors like hiring and existing ecosystem the case for F# is not clear to me.

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Data wrangling is a really clear case. I do a tonne of this and it's so much easier in FP.

I can see that. I wish I was in a more self contained environment. But most of us have to glue many different systems together and then FP is harder to pull off.

Why is data wrangling easier in FP? Is it because of functional composition being like using Unix pipelines (inside the same program)? But one can do that in a procedural language that has functions too.

Yes, functional composition in part. And while pretty-much-everyone has first-class functions now, they're usually not _quite_ as easy to declare and use as they are in F# (e.g., if you have to specify `Func<string, Func<string, int>> Foo` rather than `let Foo s1 s2 = ... `

Another data-wrangling thing easier in F# (not FP in general) is type-providers.

Thanks.

In the clojure case, it's because you've got a handful of data types and a massive amount of functions for manipulating them which you just need to glue together in a pipeline.

> it's hard to hire people

Many other commentators said something like this, so it seems to me that:

Not many people are using F#, because it's hard to find employer who needs F#. And employers don't seek for F# programmers, because there are too few of them.

Moreover, there seem to be no big codebases written in F#.

AFAIK all of https://jet.com/ is written in F#.

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