- I really want to do a project in an almost "pure" functional language. I tried with Elixir and Phoenix, and while they are certainly great, and I wouldn't mind using it again, Elixir, and subsequently Erlang didn't feel like FP a lot of times, it felt like the warty Elixir/Erlang way to do FP, so it didn't scratch that itch for me (but again, still a great experience overall)
- is there a way to do this openly? I.E. with dotnetcore, running on linux containers, no windows what so ever, etc? Guessing yes but wanted to make sure from people who have actually done it
- What exactly about the .NET libraries that has everyone so hyped up about? I remember from my C# .NET days, they always felt to be lacking.
You can `dotnet publish MyApp.fsproj` on either Windows or Linux, copy the resulting `publish/` folder to another machine with a different OS, and use `dotnet MyApp.dll` to run it. There are also ways to create containers, though I have never tried them for lack of an actual use case.
As for libraries, .NET comes with a huge standard library, much larger than what you would find on a different language. Off the top of my head, here are a few things that come with .NET that would have been a third party library in other languages: text encodings, protocols (HTTP client, TLS, QUIC, SMTP), mainstream hashes (MD5/SHA1/SHA256), mainstream crypto (AES/DES/RSA/EC/ChaCha), serialization (JSON/ XML), weird formats (X509/ASN.1/tar/MIME), mainstream compression (deflate/brotli/zip), binary data manipulation (e.g. endianness conversion, AVX intrinsics, memory-mapping), runtime code generation, in-assembly resources, interoperability (COM, JavaScript, Objective C, SQL), concurrent collections, async...
What in your opinion makes .NET so well designed?
(I think learning Standard ML first was very good for my programming practices, but I wouldn't suggest it for real projects)