If you compare the two it's obvious the F# author blatantly copied as much as he possibly could.
That's a really unfortunate choice of words. It almost makes him look like he stole something in the middle of the night and never gave anyone credit.
Don Syme worked on Project 7 which brought Generics to .NET, and then spoke with Leroy and others to bring OCaml to this environment.
The next logical step was to implement an OCaml- style language directly,
and the OCaml designers were very encouraging when we talked to them
about bringing this class of languages into the .NET space. That led to the
early versions of F#.
And come on, "bringing this class of languages into the .NET space" sounds far different than "porting a copy of a language to .NET that's 95% the same."
No, he didn't steal something in the middle of the night without giving credit, but that quote is still pretty disingenuous sounding. It's more like he copied OCaml and then only gave credit for using a similar style.
That "5%" of F# that you imply is different from OCaml involved redoing the entire .NET framework, getting generics into it.
For example, look at the early papers (from 2001) on "ILX: Extending the .NET Common IL for Functional Language Interoperability", they considered Haskell, OCaml and ML. The compiler was written in Haskell. Or "Transposing F to C#: Expressivity of parametric polymorphism in an object-oriented language".
See Don Syme's talk on F# (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/F-Sharp-History-Today-To...).
And you are continuing to bend over backwards to misconstrue what I've said. I don't know why you're being this obtuse.
> You are accusing him of dishonesty ("then only gave credit"), and laziness
Not quite...I'm sure he's been open about what he did. Your own quote said, "to implement an OCaml- style language" when what he did seemed like a lot more than just that. What I am saying is that people who say it's just in the style of OCaml aren't accurately describing it. And I never said it wasn't a lot of work, or that it indicated laziness.
> your "95% the same" comment implies that you think of a language only at the syntax level.
Fine, if you want to believe that it doesn't bother me. But you sure are continuing to put a lot of words in my mouth here.
> That "5%" of F# that you imply is different from OCaml involved redoing the entire .NET framework, getting generics into it.
I wasn't talking about that and I never said there wasn't a lot of work there. That really has no bearing on how similar F# looks to OCaml. This has to be some blatant logical fallacy, like you moving the goalposts to now include this part, too.
It's been a week and you're clearly not interested in any discussion. Just moveon.org.
It's a joy to work in
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocam...
Sadly OCaml support on Windows is not great, to put it nicely.
I just tried to start a project with F# and ended up abandoning, and am looking into Rust right now. I considered OCaml but its lack of multicore support and the ecosystem situation made me drop it.
My point was that even as second class citizen on .NET, F# has more tooling and available libraries than OCaml ever will on Windows.
For a long time OPAM did not support Windows, and right now cygwin or Linux subsystem still seem to be better ways than straight Win32 application support.
OCaml is quite nice on *NIX systems, on other kind of OSes not so much.