Comment by flakiness

It definitely was for me! The syntax is simple, it is functional first but is not pure. I started with zero experience with ml languages and got productive fast enough to enjoy it. Of course my early f# code could be improved, but it was working and while writing the code the language didn't feel like a barrier.

One caveat though: it seems FP matches my way of thinking. As an example, I always liked recursion, while some others saw it as complexifying things.

Try fsharp as fsx scripts to avoid boilerplate (see blog post linked in other comment) and you'll rapidly feel if you like it or not.

At least the tooling should be way nicer. It is way more of an OCaml language than Scala. Also much like having to deal with JVM ecosystem in Scala, you'd need to deal with .NET ecosystem in F#. In my opinion, the latter can be an advantage. F# has a lot of depth but you do not need to grasp it fully to be productive with it.

I have done a bit of both Scala and F#, I think F# is a good bit easier to learn. Scala I think mixes OOP concepts and mutability in a bit less gracefully.

It was for me.