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Comment by gsuuon | Hacker News Reader

F# is slowly making it's way into C#... but you could also just skip the wait and start using F# :p

The thing about waiting for C# to pick over F# is that JetBrains keeps up with everything new the C# team does.

I really would like to make myself use F# more, but at the end of the day, the tooling is not as good as for C#, and it feels like a step backwards.

I feel that. It always seems to come down to tooling; the moment you have to fight with tooling for a language, it immediately adds friction. Sure, individual developers can overcome these problems, but it still decreases the adoption rate of said language.

It makes me wonder what differed between the .NET and JVM runtimes, with .NET moving towards fewer languages, whereas the JVM supports more.

Microsoft seems to have some issues keeping their teams running, the Common Language Runtime has turned into C# Language Runtime, as VB doesn't get feature parity with C#, F# is only considered for writing libraries, and C++/CLI is kept alive thanks to WPD and some key partners.

Meanwhile on the native side C++/CX gets killed and replaced with C++/WinRT, lacking VS tooling and no roadmap to when it will ever get it. It is already 5 years old.

.NET Native is stuck in C# 7 and VB 15, without any clear road if it will ever be updated.

Project Reunion started one year ago as the big reunification of Win32 and UWP application models, and what we got was a tiny 0.5 release, where lots of stuff is missing, not clear roadmap on the UWP transition, Xbox and HoloLens support, VS XAML designers are planned only for 2022, if we get lucky and the project doesn't get ramped down.

Just check some of the repos on GitHub and the endless amount of open issues.

Sometimes I wonder what is everyone actually doing.

You're like the fourth person to tell me that. Maybe I should listen...

I've been writing F# professionally for 1.5 years now and let me tell you: it is a BLISS! Came from Scala so no .NET experience at all before.

How does one find a job where the company uses F# or where the team is open to it?

The 'Who is hiring' monthly posts on HN are a good source. There are a couple of companies hiring F# talent (shameless plug: Lokad does).

Come to Sweden, we have cake and we eat it too :)

With the productivity drop of lack of tooling for some key .NET scenarios that only consider C# and VB.

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