Yes and it's clear from what the F# team has said that the hope they have for the future of the language is that the community will invest.
That's fine, but let's not think that this will produce tooling anywhere nearly as refined as C#'s stuff. Take F# interactive v the C# one. F# has like a decade lead. Yet the C# interactive editor is smooth, polished, even has VS project integration, something the F# team had thought of doing many years ago.
Non F#-team members[1] have said that internal politics are the issue here. To the point where some books were ... edited ... to paint C# in a better light, relatively. MS's marketing reflects this. My guess is they're too proud to admit their flagship language from their high-profile hire was shown up by what was a research project. And that the CLR's arguably biggest tech advantage over the JVM (generics) was also only done through the intense efforts of MSR; that MS Corp was against it.
It's sad, because MS is in a position to really elevate the world's programming consciousness/ability by really promoting F#, yet it's still a novelty for, as MS has said "scientific and engineering" applications. Yet, apart from tooling/legacy, F# handles every case C# does in a better way. At worst, it's C# with lighter syntax.
Oh well. At least it's there, works, and has some level of support. Only reason I consider using .NET these days.
1: The F# folks are amazingly polite and I've never heard them even hint at a complaint about MS.
The finance industry where F# shines is willing to invest, I suppose. OCaml e.g. is backed by Jane Street and F# is even simpler in that regard because the hardest part is efficient runtime which is for F# is .NET - already done well by MS. But what some corp willing to invest in tooling for F# could do while MSVS is closed source and is not most transparent IDE in the world to say the least wrt plugins.
> too proud to admit their flagship language from their high-profile hire
That's acute while we know that high-profile hire's past victories (Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi) were never about the language, but about incredibly polished IDE, compiler, libraries and runtime.
> yet it's still a novelty for, as MS has said "scientific and engineering" applications
MS marketing wisdom is overrated, to say the very least. Look at Tablet PC. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition released in 2001. Ink APIs are all way through Windows SDK since back then. And they never realized that stylus thing is something more than just a 'uhm, you can draw a kitten, maybe?'. At least they never articulate anything more than that in any promotion campaign. And now Apple released iPad Pro and will eat the TabletPC-Covertable-Surface market.
That's fine, but let's not think that this will produce tooling anywhere nearly as refined as C#'s stuff. Take F# interactive v the C# one. F# has like a decade lead. Yet the C# interactive editor is smooth, polished, even has VS project integration, something the F# team had thought of doing many years ago.
Non F#-team members[1] have said that internal politics are the issue here. To the point where some books were ... edited ... to paint C# in a better light, relatively. MS's marketing reflects this. My guess is they're too proud to admit their flagship language from their high-profile hire was shown up by what was a research project. And that the CLR's arguably biggest tech advantage over the JVM (generics) was also only done through the intense efforts of MSR; that MS Corp was against it.
It's sad, because MS is in a position to really elevate the world's programming consciousness/ability by really promoting F#, yet it's still a novelty for, as MS has said "scientific and engineering" applications. Yet, apart from tooling/legacy, F# handles every case C# does in a better way. At worst, it's C# with lighter syntax.
Oh well. At least it's there, works, and has some level of support. Only reason I consider using .NET these days.
1: The F# folks are amazingly polite and I've never heard them even hint at a complaint about MS.