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That was true some years back before F# was released as a "first-class" language (F# 2.0 in VS2010), and the F# community is still (and probably always will be) dwarfed by the sheer number of C# programmers in the world. On the upside, the F# community has grown quite a lot in the last year; there's even an official F# Foundation now: http://fsharp.org

I ended up working with F# through my previous job; I founded a startup whose product as a .NET -> GPU JIT compiler. The idea was similar to what Xamarin is doing now with their C# (and now F#!) tools for building iOS and Android apps, in that we aimed to make GPU programming accessible to the everyday programmer.

I wrote the first version of our product in C#; it was around 30KLoC, still missing quite a lot of functionality, and buggier than I was really happy with. I'd heard that F# was based on ML, and that ML was designed for work like building compilers and theorem provers, so I decided to take the plunge and learn it. It was a little difficult to wrap my head around at first, but I stuck to it, and I ported+simplified our original C# codebase to F# within a couple of months, ending up with ~5KLoC and a new version of our product which was much faster, had fewer bugs, and overall easier to maintain than before. It sounds a little cheesy, but making the jump to F# and putting in the effort to learn it really well was one of the best career decisions I've ever made, and I haven't regretted it for a second. It's made me a much stronger developer overall.

I think you're spot on about extending Python with libraries to "ease the pain". As I've said before, Python is quite a good, useful language; however, it seems like a good chunk of the core "Python" libraries are actually C libraries designed for use with a Python wrapper.

And sure, Haskell can be a bit obtuse at first, but it's really not too bad if you actually take the time to learn it. I think the real problem is that "senior" developers get comfortable in whatever language they use day-to-day for a long time, then they try Haskell -- which is probably much different than other languages they've used before -- and since they don't immediately get it, they assume it's the language's fault and give up.




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