So what is the deal with F #, now that it has been opened?

Question

I am very pleased to know that F # will be released under the Apache license. But I'm still not sure that the language / ecosystem is something worth the time.

So - what do you think will happen now? The F # team only publishes "source drops" and currently does not accept contributions (I doubt they will ever be). On the other hand, there is F # PowerPack where you can try to make the F # world a better place (I hope they really take contributions).

There is a http://fsharp.net site with many links, but no open mailing list / forum. http://cs.hubfs.net seems empty and dead - is this really the center of the community? Is there a community?

Mono seems to be interested in F #, but will they adapt it? Plus - if MS itself tries really hard not to replace C # / VB with F #, what is the language for? You do not get the support of Code Cotracts, you are not a leader in the visual studio, there are no graphic designers, etc.

So, is F # just another MS product or something else?

Answer 1

There are many “predict the future” in this question that no one can answer, so I will skip these parts.

As for the community, the community is small (this is a relatively new language), but is growing rapidly. You can get a decent idea of ​​this from blogs on the Internet, such as Planet F # feed, or from questions in the F # tag here on SO, or from hubFS .

As for the new license, now you can do a lot of things that you could not do before. You can pack F # into the Mono distribution. You can write standalone F # tools / programs such as F # Web Snippets without resorting to ridiculous distortions so as not to violate the license (the current implementation of this tool does crazy extra work to bypass the old license). You can, well, you can do whatever you want; if you want to fork it all out, put it on github, get ten or one hundred friends to bang the code and make a F # clone for the JVM or something else, you can do it too.

Actually, I think it is most likely that in the near future it will happen that people will use the compiler source to write F # tools. If you like to evolve into emacs, then hey, now you can use all the existing F # compiler logic to easily create “go to definition” functionality when you press like Ctrl-Alt-Meta-G or something in like that (I don't know, use emacs). Or - holy crap, I can't believe I just remembered that - you could write a VS F # plugin that does what is shown here:

Is there an IDE that highlights structural syntaxes?

which I always wanted to do, but compiling F # requires using a heavy lift to get the structure of the parse tree. Oh boy, I need to take the time to do it now.

In any case, these are not all unicorns and roses; many people like to focus on “one-time sources” and “non-takes” of community support, which may not be ideal. But this is no different from the state of the world three days ago. Therefore, I will focus on what differs from three days ago, and with the new license there are some interesting possibilities for using compiler code to create some cool tools and, possibly, even increase the number of communities around these tools.

Answer 2

In addition to what Brian wrote, there is one (I think) very important point that I would like to make (Of course, I'm not at Microsoft, so I can only speak as an external observer who has been looking at programming languages ​​at Microsoft for a long time .. .):

I think releasing the source of F # does not mean that Microsoft takes it less seriously than other Visual Studio languages ​​such as C # or VB. In fact, I think the opposite is true.

There are several reasons:

• The open source model used in F # is a completely different thing, which is the open source model IronPython or IronRuby. Iron * projects have always wanted (in the end) to accept contributions. The F # team clearly knows that they want to have control over the language and develop it.

• There is a lot of interest in F # from academia, and that the community where the source code is open source is important - perhaps more because of principles than for practical reasons.

• The new features announced at PDC 2010 show a very clear vision for future data access in F # (which could potentially be applied to all other languages). I am sure that if Microsoft wants to “reset” F #, they will not show this vision in F #.