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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit like saying that Esperanto is the best teaching language. That may be true (I've no idea), but why invest in a language that is only spoken by 2 million people?

I've been wanting to play around with F# for years. Perhaps some day.

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I don't think the metaphor holds. You don't need anyone to use F# to run F# on your server. Sure, you have the library problem, but you can easily use C# libaries, so the problem isn't as big as with something like OCaml.

Because someday you're going to want someone other than yourself to work on the code. Or, even if you don't want it, the company will.

Hiring is another problem entirely. If you need lots of people very quickly it'll be hard for F# to compete with something else, but for every other case I don't think it's so clear cut. People that use and like F# really want to work with it, and are usually more experience programmers than people that know only C#. Thus, hiring for F# makes a great filter. Considering how hard interviewing and hiring is, having another signal is a good thing.

Maybe building your startup that needs 100 new people every year on F# is a bad idea, but for enterprise projects that don't move much, it seems a reasonable choice.

Hiring isn't a problem if you want to use a language for your own project or for your own learning. Do whatever floats your boat.

Hiring (or having others on the team who can work on the code) is a problem if you want to use a language in a company. (I mean, it's not if you just want to write a one-off program. It is if you're writing a program that is going to survive for a long time and be depended on by others.)

> ... but why invest in a language that is only spoken by 2 million people?

The classic chicken and egg problem

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