Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#11

Post by UK-AL »

hacker_9 wrote: post #8

I used F# for a time and ended up disliking it. The syntax is poor IMO and some bits are quite quirky. I love using Clojure though for functional programming. Most of F#s ideas come from the Lisp world anyway, but they also tried to shoehorn on a type system. It doesn't work that nicely in the end, and I don't think you get the full power of functional programming because of it.

F# is basically .NET Ocaml which relies heavily on its type system. I wouldn't compare it to LISP, except for that its functional.

it seems to me you're just not a fan of static type checking.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#12

Post by pritambarhate »

Most of the programmers do programming for a living. They are not passionate programmers who like to learn new languages. They care about getting things done. Since Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and Rails, PHP are all popular and have huge library ecosystem around them, for most of the 9 to 5 programmers, there is little incentive learn any functional language.

Also since all popular and dominant languages are either Object Oriented and/or Imperative, functional programming concepts seem too alien.

Even though I consider myself a fairly passionate programmer, I haven't found enough incentive to invest proper time to learn a purely functional language. The infatuation with Clojure and Haskell only lasted for a weekend for me. I always think, that next month I am going to invest in learning a functional language, but always something else more shiny comes along from other domain like, Dynamo DB, Firebase, RabbitMQ, etc. Which I find more practical to learn rather than learning yet another programming language.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#13

Post by gilgoomesh »

F# is very popular, for a functional programming language. In 2014 it was the most popular functional programming language on the Tiobe index, excluding SQL (in the latest index it has dropped below Scala, Scheme and Prolog).

However, functional programming languages are not highly popular. Most programmers never learn any functional programming languages, choosing instead to learn one of C#, Java, C++, Javascript and stick with it indefinitely. For that reason, F# is stuck in a position of being the number 3 .NET language under C# and VB.NET.

That final point is a different topic again: F# is under VB.NET. Few consider Visual Basic to be a great language; it survives on momentum alone. F# is comparatively new; momentum takes decades.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#15

Post by eddieroger »

wayn3 wrote: post #6
narimiran wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true, but I'm more interested in reasons behind it. Surely it isn't something like "well, this seems like high quality, therefore I will not use it".

i didnt say that people dont use it BECAUSE its good. that its good simply doesnt matter to them. almost nobody is using erlang. one of the best languages out there.

Betamax was superior to VHS. VHS won. Best is only one aspect. As was said elsewhere here a few times, functional programming is a different paradigm for most people, and learning new stuff is hard, especially when deadlines are at play.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#18

Post by illuminati1911 »

sametmax wrote: post #7

Functional languages are less popular. They are harder to learn and to use. Proprietary platform are less popular. And .net is was very closed at the begining. Non cross platform languages are less popular. And mono is not really that great on linux. Plus the usual communication, timing and hype factors.

I disagree. Functional programming languages are not harder than for example OO-languages. The thing is that people usually learn procedural or OO -paradigm first when they start programming and moving on to FP requires a mindset change.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#19

Post by agounaris »

wayn3 wrote: post #2

javascript is insanely popular and its obviously shitty. popularity correlates very lightly with quality.

Users don't care about imperative, functional, object oriented or what coffee you drink in the morning... stop calling languages shitty and get some shit done with the language you feel more comfortable with. We don't code for the shake of coding.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't F# more popular?

#20

Post by willvarfar »

pritambarhate wrote: post #12

Most of the programmers do programming for a living. They are not passionate programmers who like to learn new languages. They care about getting things done. Since Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and Rails, PHP are all popular and have huge library ecosystem around them, for most of the 9 to 5 programmers, there is little incentive learn any functional language. Also since all popular and dominant languages are e…

There are also lots of passionate hobby programmers who are passionate about results rather than the journey.

I mean, I know a ton of obscure and esoteric languages. Do I turn to them, even the cool ones, when I want to implement some idea I have? I'm afraid I often turn to the tried and tested boring languages because of the network effect. Increasingly I just use raw javascript, which is right up there with VB and PHP for unpopularity, just because it makes it damn easy to share the result with others if its in a web-page.

Post reply on HN