I'm sure I was in that room with Reed (the OP) a year ago in November. Although I don't recall the details of the conversation, I do recall the feeling within the F# community of accomplishment up until then (Nov. 2013), and excitement looking forward. As the post summarizes, 2014 was a year of great progress for both the F# language and the community. On the community side I used to know personally or through social media most of the movers and shakers. Today it seems like there is a steady stream of new contributors posting OSS projects and technical articles, far too many for me to remember or keep up with. Sergy Tihon's F# Weekly https://sergeytihon.wordpress.com/category/f-weekly/ covers more F# news than I can possibly track.

If you believe the future of software engineering includes strongly typed functional languages, then F# is the place to be for many reasons:

1) Microsoft has settled into the role of corporate curator of the language, core libraries, and core tools. I personally know the small MS team supporting F#, and I can tell you they are motivated, enthusiastic, and very capable in this role. I can also tell you the major players in the other MS language and tooling teams take an interest in following the progress of F#. Not to mention the world's most advanced quantum computing simulation compiler is written in F#. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2096...

2) F# is Microsoft's longest running major OSS effort, and the experience no doubt played a role in how MS roled out the recent open sourcing of .NET and commitment to making .NET cross-platform. Keep an eye on developments in this area, it will strengthen F# as a cross platform language.

3) And finally if you have an interest in hacking on functional languages, core components, libraries, tooling, etc., this is the place to be. You can make OSS contributions which will make a difference to users around the world.

This sounds swell!

BTW: Tomas Petricek's "Real-world functional progamming" as well as "Expert F#" by Don Syme are excellent introductions to the language.

Glad to hear they're doing well. I've been slowly tinkering with the tryfsharp.org tutorials and I'm liking what I see. It might be the first MS language I've actually liked since QBASIC.

I recently tried to teach myself F#. Although the community is very small compared to others, the folks I ran into were warm and enthusiastically helpful.

Most of the intro texts I tried were not good. I found a fantastic one, but it is an outdated, abandoned text that must be accessed through the Internet Archive [1]. I tried to contact the authors to see if I could help updating it, but received no response.

The language has a large surface area. It is not uncommon to think you have learned a lot of F#, then read a blog post by someone full of F# code and think "what the heck is that symbol?"

I agree with others that note the MS influence. Things are definitely getting better, but you will have an easier time if you are in the MS ecosystem.

For what it's worth, I wrote a blog post [2] that might be helpful if you're trying to get started.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20110715231625/http://www.ctocorn... [2]: http://inchingforward.blogspot.com/2014/11/recommended-f-beg...

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