+1 on F#, one of the most underrated language around.

It's so odd how it's been probably a decade of "F# is underrated" but nothing makes it shine to the eyes of the market .. really strange

It's really more of a result of human sentiment than anything. F# is underrated and underappreciated, and it just doesn't have a critical mass of people developing libraries for it. The issues to its adoption were being associated with .NET (Windows-only at the time) and Microsoft and being sold as a C# alternative rather than its own thing and an alternative to other languages like Python.

An interesting thought experiment is to think if someone was to release F# today as a new language but calling it something else, like Flosure or something. I bet people would lose their minds over it.

I’ve always thought Microsoft should embed it into Excel as a coequal language to VBA.

Finance programmers would go nuts!

True, and it may even attract R users since it seems functional in its core.

MS did include lambdas as a primitive but also decided to use python as new formula language.

Yeah it would have been great for finance, and the ocaml and ml langauge seems to be popular in some HFT firms.

Saddly i think even this boat has sailed since they added python to Excel now. A true miss opportunity.

Running on CLR and coming from Mordor are the prime reasons I won't even evaluate it. Not sure how prevalent or fair this is, but at least for N=1 makes it not shine.

As much as i love the CLR on technical level (as opposed to the JVM), and feel like Oracle is a much worst devil than MSFT. I completely understand the sentiment, msft have consistently done some very anti-community/open-source move with their open source offering.

Yep. Much of this is sentimental. I associate Java with Sun, which doesn't have the same aura of evil as MSFT or Oracle. Thus I hate Java mostly based on its technical merits and the thousands of hours I've wasted with it.

While this is sentimental, as in it can't be exhaustively explained by logic and known facts, I still think it's somewhat rational. Fool me once etc.

The newer generations probably don't really grasp what MSFT pulled on OSS, developers and computing in general to make it the monopoly it is. It's possible that it has changed course, but I'll probably never trust it has.