Why F# could be the next mainstream programming language (2024)

Just a polling of HN hive mind on this critical matter.

Worst case, let the "tried F# once/for real" ramblers unload their bag once more :)

Wishful thinking, me thinks. How good are the AI coding agents at coding F#?

Nonsense, .NET is one of the best ecosystems available. Your sentiment is one I tend to hear mostly from people who think it's still .NET Framework and Windows only

Could be! Depends if MS starts putting some more money behind it, including marketing. They're pretty deep in an AI-everything spiral right now though.

I'm a Clojure guy, but the ML family (specifically OCaml and F#) have always interested me as another branch of functional programming. I started out in the before times as a .NET Programmer (VB6 -> VB.NET -> C#) and have toyed with F# a little since then. It's cool, but the tooling leaves a lot to be desired compared to what's available for OCaml unless you decide to use full fat Visual Studio.

What I particularly like about them is the middle ground of inferred types. I don't need types since maps, lists, and value types are enough for me in almost all cases, but if I must use a strongly typed system why not let the compiler figure it out for me? I always thought that was a neat idea.

I tried F# when we were building out a scraper at a startup. After a bit, I realized that must of the things could also be done in C# and ended up using C# instead because it's just a bit more accessible. F# looks neat, but C# has a lot of parity at this point on some of the core selling points IMO.