It's funny because that's exactly how I felt when I learned F#. I felt pleasantly surprised and never felt like there was anything bad about the language itself.
I just wish it wasn't so deeply embedded in the .NET ecosystem.
Kind of amusing, given the whole article is about how great it is that it's embedded in the .NET ecosystem
But I also feel like the language is mainly used in a type of business environments that are already tied to .NET infrastructure anyway, and who actually appreciate the interlock.
And it could get much more traction outside of that circle, especially in the open source world.
I think that's still somewhat true just because there is momentum carried over from the past, but it's definitely something I see changing in the industry.
.NET used to mean SQL Server and Azure in addition. These days I'm seeing .NET Core with AWS and Postgres.
and now with .net core, its a better cross platform framework.
also, you can target wasm or native image now, no need to install it on the target env.
Got any examples of this?
After working full time with F# for nearly two years I can attest to this. At worst there's inconvenient things, and as you get deeper into FP you'll wish F# had certain features, but all in all it's an very sane and well designed language. I think the only thing that's caused me any pain is the lack of type classes, and after doing a lot of MVU I wish lenses were a language level feature.
I mostly only miss modules/functors, and being able to use them for abstract data types.
I mean, F# is a very reasonable choice if you want the .Net ecosystem and will most definitely solve the SDK issue but the whole thing certainly didn't convince me to try Dark.
I just thought your comment was top-level. It's unobvious on mobile.
They need to make it more visible if there is! I think it's pretty rare to see a .NET paper. I can't remember the last time I saw one, where there are tons of major JVM research projects.
The language itself is incredible, and just keeps getting better and better with every release.
It'd be neat to see people turning to .NET when writing those kinds of systems, but maybe it's just not cool enough in the Bay Area.
This is in contrast to the JVM where Java is showing its age, but mountains of work poured into the JVM keep it performant: OpenJ9 and Hotspot, Project Loom, Zero GC, as well as big non-Oracle investment such as Shenandoah GC contributed by Redhat, etc.
I think .NET can be quite an advantage, as stated also in the article.
but if I want to, say, set up a dev environment on linux, it comes with a set of quite different dependencies than what other languages use.