> I've interviewed a lot of functional candidates in a decade-long stint of functional programming professionally. My interview approach is always the same. All practical exercises, no leetcode here.

Does this mean that you're measuring, like, how fast someone can deploy a CRUD webapp in the given language? I can imagine F# would do poorly on that kind of metric; it's optimized for maintainability and doesn't take unprincipled shortcuts, whereas something like Ruby lets you type one line and it will blat out a bunch of defaults via unmaintainable magic.

> Implies that if someone just saw some code in F# and realized what people can do in it, they would be super impressed. I have not found that to be the case. If that's a general problem and not just a quirk of my personal experience, that has to be fixed first.

I don't think it's a general problem; almost everyone who spends any significant time working in F# returns to C# reluctantly if at all. It's already a "better" language in the sense of how nice it is to program in and how productive a programmer feels when doing so. But those aren't the metrics that matter.