.NET was initially planned as a multi language VM.

The first plan was to bring over Haskell, and Don (the creator of F#) implemented support for generics in dotnet.

The reason, why C# has an edge over Java, when it comes to generics. ;)

Then he noticed that Haskell wouldn't run on that runtime back then, and they chose OCaml instead.

Javascript, Typescript, Rust, and Kotlin are fundamentally functional programming languages.

I can tell you, that the community keeps it alive for all these years already.

F# used to be the project #1 across all the thousands of repositories of Microsoft in terms of community contributions to the ecosystem, compared to the contributions by paid employees.

Next, F# has already been a very refined language 10 years ago, so it doesn't get a lot of things added to begin with. Slow and steady evolution, with lots of care is the topic of this game.

Also: A lot of the paid work went into the tooling, which has finally reached a point, where I consider it industry ready.

By the way: Don isn't paid to work on F# anymore for quite some time.

The world still moves on.

From my personal perspective, would it change little, when Microsoft would F# let go.

And did you know, that they finance the development of Haskell since decades?

Simon worked literally on the same floor as Don for years.

They won't let it go. Paying 2, 3 devs is peanuts for them. They don't even notice it.

I am just scared, what will happen if F# truly competes with C# for market share.

The internal competition amongst projects at Microsoft can become quite nasty at times.

Depends on the use case.

Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam are hosted on their own platform, and lots of use cases can be covered that way.

Also, Flix is a thing, and some Scheme/CommonLisp/StandardML implementations compile to C.

Ecosystem there. Purescript, Gleam and others compile to JS.

Oh, and WebAssembly becomes valuable as compilation target as well.

Also: Kotlin is almost a functional first language like F#

F# is basically a better C#

Lots of this, especially the tooling and ecosystem, improved considerably in the last couple of years.

OCaml is a great language, as are others in the ML family. Isabelle is the first language that has introduced the |> pipe character, I think.

Grain?

frame.work

There is also the (now unmaintained) FSharp converter to it: Fez. And Elchemy. Also unmaintained. Sadly.