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Comment by chusk3 | Hacker News Reader

This is silly, F# has never been more of a first-class citizen. It's explicitly part of the .net core distributions, part of the nightly testing and validation cycles, and is in the TechEmpower benchmarks.

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Try to use EF, Forms, WPF, UWP, designers, architecture tooling with F#.

Or type providers in .NET Core.

Visual Studio 2017 has even been released with critical bugs in F# tooling, as they weren't considered as show stopper.

In regards to VB.NET and C#, it certainly feels like second class, and occasionally even C++/CLI gets more love.

That’s because C/C++ is what Windows is written in, and C# is likely used by a majority of their customer base. The only reason anyone pays attention to VB is because of Excel/VBA. F# (or Lisp for that matter) just isn’t as cool as Python or JS/TS in the wider general dev community. Which might be a terrible shame, but... it’s also the truth as it stands right now. I’m a firm believer all languages need a core platform or use case that they excel at, an ecosystem. And I’ve seen more of an attempt at that with Dart and Flutter than I have with F# up till now. Of course, we all know with the way Google kills things, it’s only a matter of time before the Chrome team ultimately kills Flutter somehow, unless it gets repositioned into the new way to make interactive banner ads... By comparison, Microsoft seems pretty stable, so I think F# will get its niche. It took Ruby over a decade before Rails came along to popularize it to a wider audience, and C++14 and friends reinvigorated C++ after many, many years. Even JavaScript languished as DHTML and jQuery for over a decade before seeing a comeback on servers and as annual standards mostly thanks to tooling and ecosystem developments powered by faster browsers and incredibly broad first-class platform support. F# sounds like a giant work-in-progress, perhaps hampered by the complexity of .NET and Microsoft in general — example: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/542 By comparison, the C# community just seems faster, larger, more decisive: https://github.com/filipw/dotnet-script/issues/156

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