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Comment by sparkie | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Microsoft don't put the effort into the F# ecosystem because it's like the gateway drug to other platforms, which aren't Microsoft. I ended up moving to Haskell after learning F#. I've since moved back to using F# as my primary language, as I'm a recovered type addict, but it does sometimes feel restrictive in its capabilities.

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My mission is to help devs, so F# is the best spot for me right now. Having said that, I'm quite interested in the theory, so I'll probably be playing around with Category Theory and Haskell over the next few years.

My biggest technical frustration with F# is just what you pointed out: they started down the OCAML route, then pulled back immediately after somebody figured out it would lead devs away from MS. Now all I hear about is how F# will integrate better into existing MS stuff and complaints about how the C# guys are copying F# stuff (and badly). None of that I'm interested in. None of that helps devs.

And I believe your and my observation are related: the more MS tries to keep F# in the fold, the more tension it's going to build between devs who want to branch out and those who don't.

The way to combat that IMO is to continue to innovate the language improving both the language and the context it runs in (tooling, ecosystem, etc) making it easier to use, more robust, minimize the costs/benefits of changing, etc. Having a great working functional language with access to a large ecosystem and decent tooling makes adoption easier and less risky. There's more to a language choice than features; it has to work for the dev's, the organization and it has to scale to the "good but not passionate" developer.

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