I think anyone who wants to use an unpopular and more powerful language (especially in Enterprise-land) should understand the tradeoff they give up for that power: you'll have a harder time finding a lot of "B level" developers. You'll have to either hire new grads and train them, or be content with a smaller pool of "A level" candidates who all care enough about their profession to learn something solely for their own betterment and who aren't afraid to learn something outside C#/Java. And who will likely all cost more.
If you need to fill a 100 head-count office, with likely overseas handoffs, perhaps a less powerful language would be better.
If you want functional programming choose one that you can find devs for! Is F# worth the trouble, is it any way better then more accessible FP langs? Lets be practical here.
In my opinion, any 'A level' candidate that knows F# probably works for MS.
Ah, I was thinking you were saying "don't use F#, just use C#/VB.NET". Which has a valid use case, to be sure, but was sort of against the spirit of the OP's question.
If I was starting greenfield, with no SLA's about a particular runtime, I think F# would still be pretty high on my list, assuming Mono support was there. It's basically OCaml + huge libraries and a kicking VM. I think my next go-to for a bigger team, heavy typed language would be probably clojure.typed, followed by Haskell or OCaml, due to a combination of simplicity, power of language and typing, and my current comfort with each.
Comments
Don't do it because other people will have trouble with your code. Consider a job posting for F# vs one of the more commonly used languages.
I think anyone who wants to use an unpopular and more powerful language (especially in Enterprise-land) should understand the tradeoff they give up for that power: you'll have a harder time finding a lot of "B level" developers. You'll have to either hire new grads and train them, or be content with a smaller pool of "A level" candidates who all care enough about their profession to learn something solely for their own betterment and who aren't afraid to learn something outside C#/Java. And who will likely all cost more.
If you need to fill a 100 head-count office, with likely overseas handoffs, perhaps a less powerful language would be better.
It's all about context.
As the author pointed out, F# seem small.
If you want functional programming choose one that you can find devs for! Is F# worth the trouble, is it any way better then more accessible FP langs? Lets be practical here.
In my opinion, any 'A level' candidate that knows F# probably works for MS.
Ah, I was thinking you were saying "don't use F#, just use C#/VB.NET". Which has a valid use case, to be sure, but was sort of against the spirit of the OP's question.
If I was starting greenfield, with no SLA's about a particular runtime, I think F# would still be pretty high on my list, assuming Mono support was there. It's basically OCaml + huge libraries and a kicking VM. I think my next go-to for a bigger team, heavy typed language would be probably clojure.typed, followed by Haskell or OCaml, due to a combination of simplicity, power of language and typing, and my current comfort with each.
you can check user groups for developers, not too bad http://fsharp.org/groups/