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F# Software Foundation

fsharp.org

41 pointsbtian8 comments

F# is a great language, and Petricek's enthusiasm for it is really inspiring. However, my major problem with the foundation in its current form is that they appear to be at least informally very closely tied to Microsoft. And I don't mean the cool people from MSR who developed the language in the first place.

For example, the official MS party-line has been to withhold releasing standalone compilers unless they are bundled with some "free" visual studio crap. Compiling the compiler from source every time I want to check something on another machine is simply not an option and it's one of the primary reasons I haven't moved to the new 3.0 version.

That's precisely the kind of problem a truly independent foundation could easily solve, but so far they haven't demonstrated any willingness to move in a way that could be considered competing with Microsoft's own products.

I'm glad you like F#. I agree it is a great language and I think it fills a big gap on mono and the CLR. The foundation (www.fsharp.org) is still _very_ young! We are looking into how to improve cross platform tooling and support. For example, soon (if not already) MonoDevelop 3 will come with F# pre-built on Mac. There is still a lot of work to do but we do recognise this as a key issue. I encourage you to join the foundation and help out by suggesting how we might go about improving.

Zach (a programmer - never employed by Microsoft)

Early days for FSSF. You can use F# with MonoDevelop on Windows. Standalone compilers for all platforms are in the works.

F# transfers a few interesting ideas from OCaml and has some language-constructs I really like.

But when it comes to using F# in the past, I always ended up spending too much time assisting the language in inferring my types.

It became a chore to write properly generic code and reusable functions in F#. Maybe I didn't follow some convention or did things in an un-idiomatic fashion. I don't know. But it always ended up more work than I assumed it would be.

These days, if I need my functional kick, I'll go to clojure. And clojure seems to have a much more healthy ecosystem and third party support.

As much as I like F#, especially as a .NET developer, I'm sorry, but I just don't find myself using it very much.

How did you learn your F#?! Have never had any problem writing reusable functions.

On windows 8,000 nuget packages works for me as an ecosystem. on linux/osx/droid we have xamarin booming along.

Nice page, an example of the language in action of the front page would be nice though. After some browsing I have, although I have looked at F# in the past, resorted to Wikipedia for a quick glance to remind me of the looks of the language.

I strongly agree with this. F# is a very readable language, and can do quite a lot with very small amounts of code. I think more people would be interested in it if they could see how beautiful F# code can be.

REPL doesn't seem to work. Am I missing something? I don't see a "run" button, and Ctrl-Enter doesn't work. Chrome on OS X 10.8.

I agree with the other comments, would be nice to have a sample "hello world" on the front page to set the tone for the website. I always feel like websites like these should have a strong bias towards noobs, because advances users don't need help finding there way around.

It's also missing a prominent download button and "Getting started" link.

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