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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

I read good things about F#, including that it is a first class citizen of Microsoft... but I have worries that it could become second class if some financial decision deems it not worth the effort to support for them.

From a functional perspective, I would think the two primary candidates would have been F# with its .NET ecosystem or Clojure with its Java ecosystem. Both are similar in more ways than other languages, especially considering the rich set of libraries available...

But to me the deciding factor would be ClojureScript for the front end. They stuck with ReasonML, if I read correctly, because they already had so much code (50k lines?). But at the same time, the previous post complained about the build tools. Plus it's still Ocaml...

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F# is 15 years old and there has been a "F# foundation" for past 5 of those.

If your concern about Microsoft abandoning F# is genuine then perhaps that can re-assure you.

I keep reading good things about F# but at the same time it seems to fly under the radar, with not enough learning material out there

I did love this one article http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/

EDIT: Submitted the link here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24980325

I agree in the difficulty of finding abundant, good examples for F#. I'll throw out some plugs for ones that I liked.

* https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-func... Uses F# as implementation language, though I cannot recommend this book enough for general type-safe design modeling regardless of the language.

* https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ Website of the author of the book mentioned above. He also has some good Youtube videos on the topic.

* https://www.demystifyfp.com/FsApplied/ A book that will walk you though developing a webserver, and also introduces you to Paket for dependency management.

I don't develop F# (or .NET) professionally, but I had fun when I played around with it. I found the interop with C# very seamless as well.

I find Microsoft's documentation pages on F# to be a great reference as well, particularly if you're already well versed with .NET

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

Thank you!!

The author, Paul Biggar, was the founder of CircleCI which does use Clojure(Script). I don't know if he has written on why he chose not to use the same stack for Darklang.

He didn't list Clojure(Script) in programing languages in his CV (both significant experience and others) https://paulbiggar.com/paulbiggar.pdf

The CV appears old. His recent position is listed as starting July 2010 to present, but looking at his LinkedIn we see his finished at Mozilla in 2011. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbiggar/

Can read about how CircleCI's continued use of Clojure in 2017: https://circleci.com/blog/tips-for-optimizing-docker-builds/ And again in 2019: https://circleci.com/blog/update-how-circleci-processes-over...

I've worried about Microsoft's commitment to F# in the past, but as of late they seem clearly committed to signal boosting the language as a way to grab mindshare from people who are averse to C# for whatever reason. I recall from their F# Jupyter notebooks demo they specifically implied they're trying to steal Python's lunch in the data science world

At this point though I believe the F# community is active and resourceful enough to carry themselves even if Microsoft directed resources away from the language. One of the things I noticed early on about the F# community is they tend to be mindful about their investments, and like to mold existing, established work into something more ergonomic for the F# community. The Giraffe, Fable, and Bolero projects are all wonderful examples of this mentality.

Clojurescript creates lots of overhead on the runtime, I wouldn't recommend it for UIs that need to do more than very lightweight processing on the client and be really snappy. A 50k LoC codebase(as in Dark) in Clojurescript will be a nightmare. To scale a Clojure(script) codebase to that size requires lots of documentation and discipline(and lots of tests!), it can me made but it's not easy.

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