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Comment by unbanned | Hacker News Reader

Real world use cases of F# which aren't pet projects and the empty set are equivalent.

jet.com used it heavily for backend dev, grew quickly, were acquired by Walmart, 560million+ in funding: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/jet

Even if you'd consider them the Jane Street of F#, it's a counterexample to your argument.

Hasn't Walmart rewritten all the Jet stuff in python and c# by now?

At least that's what I was being told five years ago.

How much of the jet.com code is still in use nowadays?

Having been through a couple of merges during my lifetime, I guess "it depends".

Not really.

https://careers.walmart.com/us/jobs/WD635714-senior-software...

>Top-notch programming skills, with an interest in functional programming languages. We use F# right now but are transitioning to Java.

It's still used for the warehouse distribution team though

We've built a high-performance in-memory data transformation engine in F# and it works like a charm in thousands of installations around the world every day and supports business-critical processes in many organizations.

> which aren't pet projects and the empty set are equivalent

Wow. So much hubris in that sentence. I used to work with a startup in Sydney that still regularly uses F# for middleware/backend work. When I was there for 1.5 years, I saw the # of users of our product went up 3x but with very little delta in defects, rework etc. F# wasn't the only reason for this of course but it helped.

I've worked for two different finance companies that are entirely on F#. One has huge customer bases and sells the product as on prem hosted solutions, the other hosts internally.

I have been consulting at a world-renown hedge fund that has a lot of F# including nightly processes that have apparently been running for years with zero maintenance. You'll never hear them talk about it or see them at meet-ups though. The CTO is a bit of a maverick -- I'm not suggesting that this type of quiet adoption is common.

Sadly in my experience it is common for F# given its finance background at least historically, particularly in London/Europe. There is a culture of not showing your cards in these environments having worked in a few of them, and quietly being a success. Its an "arms race" with your competitors after all - only people in the industry jumping between companies have an idea what their other competitors are using often sometimes with "non-compete" clauses. Meetup's/conferences/articles showing your work are often explicitly banned or at best not encouraged by the companies for commercial reasons.

We have F# in production.

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