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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

It's "awesome" ... yet still many years on behind. These are the kinds of things that should have been in v1 or v2. Things that F# got right from the get-go.

It's great if you have to work on projects that are stuck with C# (but can freely use the latest compiler).

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Given how much MS has invested in Haskell, and how little/late they use that technology to their advantage has made me wonder many times what drives their R&D budget.

Non the less: cool "new" features in C#, and thank you very much MS for investing so generously in Haskell!

Do remember, they also have F# which is very much a functional language (in the style of SML or Ocaml)

Do they invest that much in Haskell? SPJ's salary, and previously Simon Marlowe's salary. That's nothing compared to what they actually put money into.

It's a very large investment from the perspective of Haskell, a miniscule investment from the perspective of Microsoft.

Couldn't have put it better myself! Thank you for understanding my point.

Let's be humble and call it a big investment. :)

They still have arguably done more for the language than any other major corporation. Saying "they could have done more" seems a little petty.

Arguably? Almost certainly. That, however, was not my point ...

Let me clarify. I wasn't responding to cies's second line (Microsoft has contributed a lot to the Haskell community for which we are very grateful) but the first.

It would be a mistake to think that from Microsoft's perspective they feel they have spent enough money to even begin to think about extracting some sort of reciprocal benefit from that.

Admittedly my comment was ambiguous.

Well remember that the F# team had generics before C#, and they are the only reason the CLR shipped with real generics in v2. So that's a pretty big return, seeing as real generics was a flagship feature difference between the CLR and JVM.

Don't forget that F# was mostly "forked" from OCAML, while C# was mostly "forked" from Java. So yes, F# got some OCAML features, but it got the weird ML syntax as well.

It has nothing of weird.

Not only syntax, a lot of the restrictions feel weird for a Java/C#/Scala programmer as well. E.g. functions needing to be declared before you can use them feels like you are coding in C again.

F# probably is a better functional-with-OO-aspects language, but C#/Scala are clearly better OO-with-functional-aspects languages and programmers currently want the latter.

I'd argue that restriction of F#'s is actually a feature. Cyclic dependencies are a real beast to reason about, and I like that F#'s lexical scoping means I need to opt-in to mutually recursive functions with `let rec`.

You're probably right that it feels unfamiliar to Java/C#/Scala programmers, but I enjoy the sense of security that F# and other restricting languages provide.

It started with "weird ML syntax" but they developed a new syntax and migrated to it. It hasn't used the original syntax for a while now.

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