It's not simply a matter of deciding to build software for the masses. It's essential that we have software that aims at small niches because bigger mass market software can be built on top of it.
LLVM is a great example. LLVM is only useful to the tiny subset of programmers who do compiler/JIT engineering, and it requires a lot of domain expertise. Regardless, its existence has enabled a huge set of new software to be built - clang is a great compiler, emscripten is one of the first real options for running native apps in the browser, etc. None of those would exist without LLVM. Imagine how hard it would be for people to contribute to LLVM if it were written in an obscure functional language instead of in a ubiquitous one?
As far as cruft goes, yeah, F# is less verbose, but it's also harder for me to understand and harder for me to debug. A few years of practice might solve that, but it doesn't offer me enough advantages to justify that huge investment, especially since during that time I'll be writing worse-performing software whether I like it or not. The same applies for any new language, really, and I don't think new languages are a bad thing. I just think the idea that a widely-used language should be replaced with a niche one is pretty out of touch.
If you're really just doing copy/paste programming, I don't think the language you use matters, and F# offers no particular advantage for that. It seems most useful in scenarios where you are writing code from scratch, and the more robust type system and expressiveness can let you do that faster with less mistakes.
i think that's the minority of c# developers though.
> I'm not really willing to sacrifice even more performance just because some FP fanatic thinks C# should go away
why should that even be question though? now think of a web application. suddenly f# reduces the amount of cruft you have to a great extent. why do people always think it's an either or? why can i not like html5, and still want it to stay outside of my desktop application?
> it's a far more inconvenient language to use for someone that hasn't been living and breathing ML for years.
yes, you may be right. but i think most programming is really copy and paste programming. when they know where they can find what they need to write their program it doesn't really matter what language it is written in.
> even if I don't like some of the shitty design baggage that comes with it
:D
> It's already a struggle to get the community engaged with my project, JSIL - if it was written in an obscure language like F#, it'd be nearly impossible
interesting project. well, i would argue that it's because your project is not really playing to the masses. vsvim for example has more forks and stars than your project, 33% of it (the core) is written in f#. but it has also been around for much longer, and addresses a need people have.