I think C# is the one and only language to consider if you're doing anything serious in .NET. While F# is academically interesting and maybe OK for some personal or solo projects, you'll struggle to find developers for anything of substantial size.

I'd agree with this but F# is increasingly moving towards first class support.

I will believe that when F# gets a spot in UWP, right now it seems on its way out with an open ticket for support since Windows 10 came out.

We should make a bigger fuss about F# support for UWP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007166

Is that true? I see no evidence for that.

Apparently a bunch of extensions like C, C++, Python, Go are available. Not sure 'bout "first class support".

FYI... interesting collection of .net core stuff here: https://github.com/thangchung/awesome-dotnet-core

i tried f# and it really feels like a second classe citizen ( at least on macos). Very few educational resources. You still need to spend a lot of time on c sharp to learn the frameworks, and then maybe move to f#.

The problem is F# does not use the Roslyn compiler (but does use other components of the Roslyn tool stack in Visual Studio) and it uses things in the IL (primarily tail calls) the other .NET languages do not -- and the rest of the Microsoft teams understandably want to move fast on all the initiatives surrounding .NET Core.

This results in the Microsoft F# team and the F# community contributors playing catch-up. Eventually F# will catch-up, but it is going to take time.

Microsoft's own .NET Native runtime is simply not .NET compliant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007166

This is unacceptable and should be fixed ASAP. F# is a mature language existing for more than a decade, there is simply no excuse to let this slide.

Microsoft had to fix the C# compiler. The result was Roslyn. It's actually amazing that Roslyn was a successful project. Probably most software projects that ambitious fail. The project would have failed if they tried to make it F# compliant at the same time.

Speaking as someone who makes his living writing F# code, I'm as frustrated as anyone about this, but there will be a successful resolution. I just don't know how soon. Before today's announcements my personal thinking was that it would be this autumn. That's still possible. In the meantime I can still function in the F# world, as before. It just remains frustrating to branch out into some of the areas I would like to.

If it's going to be fixed this year, then why isn't it even on the official road map? https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/2400

You're absolutely correct about .NET native not being .NET compliant...sigh...there are just higher priorities for such a big company. As quoted in the comments " [F# native support] depends on the Core CLR team improving support for a couple of big items. dotnet native is and AOT compilation are absolutely a goal for us ... they just are longer term than this roadmap anticipates."

It's actually eye-opening how few the number of people at MS who actually write code is. I suppose if there were more coders they would be stepping all over each other and never get anything done.

Politics more likely.

You might want to take a look at this announcement RE: F# https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/08/14/f-and-net... (does not mention native, but does address other deficiencies)

F# was supported on the MDIL compiler for Windows 8.x, then Microsoft did not consider the language relevant enough to support on the new .NET Native compiler when Windows 10 came out, almost two years ago.

How much time do they need to catch up?

This has been my experience as well and I have really good f# devs available to answer questions.

Visual Basic .NET is still getting new features, though they recently announced they will stop keeping exact parity between VB and C# language features. (Instead, it looks like they are interested in making it easier to include C# code in your VB project and vice versa long-term.)

Discussion of VB.NET language design can be found here: https://github.com/dotnet/vblang