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Comment on Get Started with F# as a C# developerparent

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If you want to get things done in .NET Core, use C#.

And if you want to get things done in F#, don't use .NET Core. :) Good thing .NET Core is merely the .NET du jour, not the only .NET.

If anyone doubts this, compare the number of F# repos to Elixir/Scala on Github.

Challenge accepted. It turns out that GitHub's advanced search page can answer questions like this directly:

Projects written in F#: 4,246 (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3AF%23&t...)

Projects written in Elixir: 4,667 (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3AElixir...)

That's less than 10% higher. Plus, I'd guess there is a bias against closed-source projects in that result, owing to the nature of .NET.

Scala is indeed a lot higher at 38,424 projects, though I wonder how many of the complaints about F# from C# users apply apply equally to Scala. (e.g. Poor GUI builder support, no native compiler, etc.)

F#'s language representation on GitHub is also nearly equal to that of OCaml, a much older language.

I'd say that's a pretty good showing for a new-ish language. Not everything's going to pop to the top like Swift, which IMHO is a "people in Hell want ice water" reaction to Objectionable C.

And if you want to get things done in F#, don't use .NET Core. :)

Yep - stick with the version of .NET that MS is desperately trying to deprecate - remember recently when they tried to get away with not supporting ASP.NET Core 2.0 on the full framework?

Good thing .NET Core is merely the .NET du jour, not the only .NET.

Yep, who would want to use the cross-platform, modern implementation of .NET?

That's less than 10% higher.

Except that F# has been around twice as long as Elixir (2005 vs 2011.)

F# is the minor league team that C# farms features from. Nothing more in microsoft’s eyes.

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