Why F#? | slacker news

I learned F# in 2013 and had a lot of fun with it, some of that code remains on Github (e.g. a 2D platformer game for windows https://github.com/lihaoyi/FSharpMetro/tree/master/Applicati...).

My experience was that it was a surprisingly nice language with a surprisingly warty user experience: papercuts ranging from naming conventions and function call styles (`|> List.map` vs `.Select`), basic syntax (`foo.[0]` to lookup arrays), type system features (F# doesn't have covariance/contravariance even though C# does), IDE support (back then was only Visual Studio, whose support for F# was inferior to C#).

Ended up settling on Scala after that, as a language with its own Warts, but one that somehow managed to feel a more cohesive than F# did despite having largely the same featureset and positioning.

F# was my first functional language and one that changed how I look at programming, but at the same time I'm happy to not actually have to use it for serious programming!

I think these days F# is probably a big more polished than what you remember, so perhaps it's worth giving it another shot.

Being a hosted language always requires certain compromises (something that was also apparent in Scala). I used to do Scala professionally in its early days, but for me it felt it added just as much complexity as it addressed. I focused on Clojure back then (on the FP side at least), and I do think that F# probably brings more to the table than Scala. (if one is not constrained to Java, that is)

The tooling story is not great, but I've almost never seen great tooling for a language that's not super popular. I'm guessing what you get today with Rider is more or less as good as what VS has to offer.