Why F# evangelism isn't working

ericsink.com

20 points·mrry··5 comments

Why is it not working for me: C# = language and tools.

Where is my ReSharper/Roslyn for F#?

No, I am not going to use a plain text editor like nix guys.

No, I am not going to contribute to the open-source F# tools (Microsoft has some spare cash I think).

I don't care that "dude, F# compiler is already written in idiomatic F# in 10x less code"!

Maybe I am one of those lazy enterprise programmers, but how come do I love immutability, actor model and monads? I'll have my tools today and better language tomorrow with C# than exactly the opposite with F#.

PS: check this blog post to learn the full extent of the evangelistic lower-back burn (why, why aren't they coming to our elegant almost-purely-functional language !?): http://tomasp.net/blog/2014/csharp-6-released/index.html

ReSharper will be redundant when Visual Studio 2015 is released. VS 2015 ships with many Resharper features built in, and the few that aren't will be trivially added via extensions utilising the new Roslyn APIs.

So expect to see that F# gap close substantially next year, regardless of what Jetbrains do.

You are aware that Roslyn doesn't support F# nor has it anything to do with it, right?

Did you notice the date on that C#6 post?

That's because F# is a Microsoft language and by thus it is limited to .NET world. But if we look at other ML languages such OCaml we can see that they're gaining popularity.

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