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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty sad that F# is sitting on the sidelines wondering what it did wrong to not get these accolades. I guess, "Being unable to enter a mobile ecosystem that's being held on a very old language runtime," is perhaps not the most desirable outcome for Android but dang if it hasn't worked out well for Kotlin's press.

People are going TO Kotlin as opposed to the usually Ocaml/F#/Haskell/Idris/Agda world of the community trying to bring people in.

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Kotlin is competing against Java, while F# is competing against C#.

F# is a great language, but so is C#. MS has done a really great job evolving C# away from a Java clone. C# keeps adding features inspired by functional languages, narrowing the gap to F#. Of course this makes it easier to switch, but on the other hand it also makes it less interesting.

There's an argument to be made that F#'s place in the .NET ecosystem is to be a feature sandbox for C#.

When F# first dropped, I was instantly in love. It was just so much nicer than C#, which was already nice. But, in the intervening years, C# has been adding new features at such a steady clip that it's hard for me to have such strong feelings anymore. Stylistically I like to have algebraic types and pattern matching, but from a practical perspective I think the two languages probably offer about the same level of productivity.

Kotlin has its merits but the only real reason it is where it is is because its JetBrains' language.

Kotlin has been treated as a first class citizen in the official Android IDE and one of the major Java IDEs in a way that no other language but Java itself is.

> People are going TO Kotlin as opposed to the usually Ocaml/F#/Haskell/Idris/Agda world of the community trying to bring people in.

The familiarity of C-style syntax and object orientation immediately places Kotlin above ML-style programming languages from the standpoint of adoption. It's a bit unfortunate that this is the case, but selling Android developers on a better C-style OO language than Java is a lot easier than selling them on something different.

I'll see your F# and raise you one Clojure.

I was around when the Clojure community seemed to make a conscious decision to not chase Android, so it's precisely their decision to miss that train.

But I think Clojure isn't in a terrible spot right now. It gets a modest amount of use. More than I think many people imagined it possibly could have.

I sincerely hope Datomic Ions[1] take off, they are an amazing way to run Clojure code.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbthtdBw93w

Clojure approach to mobile development is to piggy back on React Native. Using [re-natal](https://github.com/drapanjanas/re-natal) is pretty smooth nowadays, and you get some really nice benefits such as hot code loading, and being able to use re-frame for the UI.

React Native works well enough for a lot of apps out there, and makes it relatively easy to write cross-platform apps. So, it's a pretty good platform to build on in my opinion.

I dunno. I've yet to meet a shop that isn't tactically retreating from it within a year of shipping.

I've seen about as many companies talking about being happy with it as those retreating from it. Personally, I haven't seen any issues with it that I would consider to be show stoppers.

F# isn't owned by the .NET team, which then focus on VB.NET and C#, and anything that improves F# just happens to be a "nice to have".

They haven't yet bothered to make .NET Native understand the MSIL bytecodes required by F#, for example.

Coming from Java - learning Kotlin is borderline trivial. I think having the huge audience of Java (+Android) (+IntelliJ) developers to draw from was a huge advantage for Kotlin.

Why are you throwing out all kinds of FP languages when Kotlin is not one?

Try Arrow.

I already use arrow :)

Kotlin's "not FP" in the way Scala is "not FP" and Swift is "not FP." It's pretty FP, in my experience. Just not strictly. :)

Notice how none of the langs you point out are not mentioned though. Comparing an FP-light to classical FP languages is not equivalent.

from where do you get that F# is sitting on the sidelines?

i see more books and open source projects for F# than kotlin, which for a while made me skeptical about the truth of kotlin popularity

I talk to a lot of Android folks. Most have already made the switch, and consider the growth of the language "explosive". That Google is opting in there only makes it better.

F# has been around a long time and while it's experiencing modest growth and I think it has a positive track, I've certainly never seen it hyped and on the tip of every tongue the way Kotlin now is within the Android space.

well, sure, if what you mainly work on is android, then it make sense that kotlin is getting hyped

that being said, for an outsider (i mainly do BI and DB stuff), it seem like xamarin (C# and F#), flutter (Dart), react native (reasonml) .. might seem like the options to investigate first nowadays

i think outside of android development, kotlin .. is not hyped at all

Sure, but Android is one of the top 3 most deployed application environments in the world. It's a pretty big and important market.

I think it is completely unrealistic to expect F# to gain traction in Android. Google would never support it, and I don't think the platform is open enough for others to make it happen.

Maybe but F# has been around for much longer. It failed already to become mainstream.

Try to write a UWP or WPF application in F#, use EF designers with F#, follow up on Visual Studio changes related to F#.

Heck even PowerShell now has a WinForms designer.

I think, this might be because F# is community driven, and there is little interest in pushing API that is not portable to Linux

F# was always linux friendly, long before .net core

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