I suspect they were either referring to pre-.NET Core days before the new project formats came out or they're creating projects in Visual Studio and checking all the optional boxes. There indeed did used to be a lot more required boilerplate to get some code running. Now you can run a .NET project quite nicely in VS Code with 2 total files.
Re:Why F#?
by shortrounddev2 on Tuesday April 01, 2025 @10:45AM
(#43547401)
Well also if you're using Visual Studio it will generate solution files as well, not just fsproj. I grew up doing C/C++ so boilerplate project/IDE/make files as well as build objects are something I expect to see. I think people who work in primarily JIT'd/interpreted languages are used to just having a directory tree full of source files and having some CLI tool manage everything for them. Maybe a dependency list file as well, but that's about it. Python is like this, and javascript CAN be like this
For F#, projects are needed to make full applications or libraries. Otherwise, you can simply write F# scripts with .fsx and execute them via 'dotnet fsi {SomeScript.fsx}'.
(obviously you can also specify dotnet fsi as shebang and integrate these scripts into general scripting on Unix systems - it's very productive)