Comment by rockyj

I like F#'s syntax when all you're doing is pure logic. But when you have to interface with any IO like a database or REST call or something, you have to abandon the elegance of ML syntax and use these ugly computation blocks. In C# you can do something like this:

    var post = await _postService.getById(id);

    let getPostById id = async {
        let! post = blogPostService.getPostById id
        return post
    }

    let post = getPostById 42 |> Async.RunSynchronously

1. Do all logic in ML-syntax, then pass data into a computation block and handle I/O operations as the last part of your function, then return unit OR

2. Return a C#-style Task<> and handle all I/O in C#

Either way, ML-style languages don't seem like they're designed for the kind of commercial CRUD-style applications that 90% of us find ourselves paid to do.

I understand your perspective. I like to view niche languages as a medium for learning. For instance, I enjoy using Rust in my personal projects—even if many of these projects may never be released—because the lessons on immutability, functional programming constructs, and trait-oriented programming significantly enhance my day-to-day work. Therefore, I believe that learning niche languages, even in the absence of a robust job market, is worthwhile.

>" I was quite surprised by how many project files and boilerplate was generated by .NET, which put me off.

With which language are you comparing with?

Because there's afaik csproj and maybe .sln

and both of them are let's be frank - foundational for almost all projects that arent just hello world.

Otherwise you end up with some cmakes or something similar that want to achieve something similar

I hear you on the opportunity side and I can't see that changing. The good news is in recent releases there's a lot less boilerplate - "dotnet new console -lang F#" results in two files, a short fsproj file and a single line of Hello World.

As sibling comment pointed out, it's just .fsproj manifest and Program.fs file. What boilerplate do you speak of? It's on the opposite end boilerplate-wise to projects made in e.g. Java or TypeScript.

For F#, projects are needed to make full applications or libraries. Otherwise, you can simply write F# scripts with .fsx and execute them via 'dotnet fsi {SomeScript.fsx}'.

(obviously you can also specify dotnet fsi as shebang and integrate these scripts into general scripting on Unix systems - it's very productive)

F# is quite usable with AI. All AI models are perfectly capable of generating idiomatic F# code. In fact, because it has a nice type system, if you ask the AI to model the problem well with types before implementing, hallucinated bugs are also easier caught.

It is possible to start your project with the script possibilities offered by F# (as mentioned in the blog post). It is absolutely a viable approach and I even blogged about it a couple of months ago: https://www.asfaload.com/blog/fsharp-fsx-starting-point/

I find F# easy to use with AI, mainly because it's statically typed (which results in compiler errors when the LLM generates non-working code) and it's very expressive, which allow me to more easily comprehend what the LLM is trying to do.

> But then where are the jobs and which companies care if you write good code?

Oh man, that is poignant :( They always say they do in the job description, but it always a different story once you get there.

I learn them as a fun hobby, with no salary expectations. It keeps the dream alive, and I learn a lot from the Common Lisp community that I do use in my job.

Opportunities do exist, even when they’re few and far between. I learned Rust in my spare time because I was really interested in it. Then we stumbled across something that would have really benefitted from a cross platform library and lo and behold, I got to use my Rust knowledge, even though the vast majority of my day job doesn’t use it.