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Comment by muststopmyths | Hacker News Reader

F# has tended to lag far behind C# in Microsoft's ecosystem. I haven't kept up with in a few years, so I don't know how far behind it still is. It is a fun language for sure.

If your friend is looking into getting into .net for professional purposes, I would steer them towards C# first. That's likely to be much more useful in the long term. Especially since it can be a stepping stone to other C/C++ like languages.

With F# I would bet that they hit some limitation sooner or later where something that could be easily done in C# will take more work in F#. Which could be fine if they have the time/inclination to rough it. I just would not advise F# as a resume builder.

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While I fully agree with F# being the step child of C#, an easy way to see what’s better is how many features get copied from which language to the other (hint: C# is like China copying tech from F#).

Start with F#. Learn the basics well.

Parent - Checkout

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/introduction-...

>With F# I would bet that they hit some limitation sooner or later where something that could be easily done in C# will take more work in F#.

From my experience of working with both C# and F# for a few years, it's more likely to be the other way around.

F# lacks the Visual Studio tooling support that VB.NET, C# and even C++ enjoy.

It is also not officially supported on UWP, and needs some hacks to the generated MSIL (as .NET Native doesn't cover 100% of all MSIL).

Most of the F# community seems to be using Ionide on VS Code. This works very well, but if Visual Studio is your preferred editor this can be annoying.

IDE support is much more than just editing text.

For example, try to generate EF 6 Database First code for F#, or use Blend alongside Visual Studio with F#.

Ionide gives you IDE features like type annotations and auto-complete.

Completely ignored my use cases.

I was responding to:

> IDE support is much more than just editing text.

In case anyone reading this thread comes away thinking that VS Code + Ionide is only a text editor.

The support for F# in VS leaves a lot to desire, indeed. However, in my experience, I've found that the developer productivity gains from F# outweigh the inconvenience.

Only if what you are doing is directly supported by F#.

If you attempt to do GUI development, then you are forced to look for community projects like Fabulous, use the XAML type provider with a dummy C#,VB.NET,C++/CLI project for the XAML generation, or actually use one of those languages for the UI, with F# used only for the logic.

So even though I am a big fan of ML language family, at the end of the day, the other .NET languages get the green light from most customers and team.

I don't recall having too much difficulty getting the VS WPF XAML Designer to basically function with F#. Some features just don't light up like event connecting/code-behind, but that's fine and what I wanted anyway (taking an MVVM-ish approach).

There's a hope that with F#'s upcoming move to the "shared project system" that a lot of the pains will go away in hopefully the near future.

(That said, Fabulous has piqued my interest and I'm debating rewriting my big F# GUI in it, at least in an exploratory branch.)

Meh - recently worked on a huge corporate solution where some enthusiastic person included F# projects for tests- soon the project readme included : To get VS intellisense working disable the F# projects as it would randomly cause intellisense to break in the entire solution.

There was an issue with the C# tooling about 3 years ago that led to this, but it was fixed in the subsequent VS update.

Had this problem one year ago using VS 2017 and up-to-date software (along with the rest of the team, VS 2019 wasn't stable yet don't know if it's fixed there).

First I'd recommend upgrading to VS 2019, because you're currently missing ~1.5 years' worth of improvements in C# and F# tooling (core development for VS 2017 stopped well before the VS 15.9 release to stabilize it). If it still reproduces, then please use the Report a Problem tool to file an issue. The team who builds C# tooling would be interested in fixing that kind of problem.

Oh for sure - I'm not using .NET/VS anymore different clients and all, and I think the team stripped out the F# tests out of the solution - just saying it couldn't have been the thing fixed 3 years ago.

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