Perhaps they want to have access to some features that ocaml has that F# does not. Like:

* gadts

* first class anonymous modules

* functors (module level functors)

* polymorphic variants

* row polymorphism

* effect handlers

Although, I must confess, I haven't exactly kept up to speed on F# development. Perhaps F# has added some of these features recently?

I haven't used F# in a couple years now, but the longtime position of the maintainers has been that F# will not and should not adopt many features along those lines because they interact poorly with the .NET type system.

It's not a perfect comparison, but, having spent some time dealing with all the unusual and surprising ways that some Scala language features interact with Java's type system, I tend to agree with the F# community on that point.

Why won't OCaml steal F# features then?

I think the first questions to ask would be, which ones would it steal and why?

Sincere thanks! This is exactly what I meant to ask!

As others have hinted at, F# and OCaml are really not interchangeable languages. They handle lots of things in very, very different ways. Even the difference in runtime makes a big difference. You could very similarly have asked, "Why use Objective-C when we have Java?"

I would rather ask why use Java (for reasons other than the large legacy code base and the job market) when we have Scala (which doesn't even force you to program functionally and can be used as "a better Java" if you want, it can be used to write really weird code but doesn't have to).

Having spent some time using both in a professional context, I would actually choose Java over Scala. And I say that as someone who cut their teeth on functional programming and still tends to prefer it over OOP.

The problem with Scala is that good, maintainable code is defined more by how many language features you have the discipline to avoid using than it is by how many you do. And that makes it more difficult to keep a large Scala codebase maintainable on a team with varying levels of experience. Freely mixing ad-hoc and subtype polymorphism (that is, type classes and subclasses), for example, is a very short, very slippery slope to a situation where the best way to figure out how the code works is to already know how the code works.

Scala, The Walmart of language paradigms.

I never could wrap my head around the context variables or whatever they were called, where the language would pick a random variable from your local environment and pass that as an argument to the function call.

Well, those two are comparable. Java is based on Objective-C (it's ObjC without the C… or the Smalltalk… which is why there's not much left.)

And the App Store still runs on a Java port of WebObjects to this day.

It doesn't matter which functional language you use, any will do its educational purpose.

But as for other languages, there is pros and cons for each of them. I never tried F#, only Haskell and OCaml.

Sure. I'm just curious what do people who are into functional programming actually think. I've taken a look at F# and other MLs and F# seemed the best althoigh not this simply - another ML (I can't easily recall which one) had some interesting features F# lacked. So I hunt for curious thoughts people may have on this when they MLs are discussed. I personally have little interest in academic computer science but do have strong interest in using cool programming languages to write concise reliable code. Functional languages really shine at saving a solo developer's time as most of the bugs are caught during compile time, verbosity generally is lower and readability generally is higher.

Its owner doesn't really know where to drive it to.

However in general, any would do.

I mean Microsoft.

Quite curious what those 1831 members would do, if Microsoft decides to play a VB6/VB.NET (both now in maintenance) on F#.

Does Microsoft care about F# at all? Wasn't it a short-lived experiment of the 2000th creative era which just happened to attract enough persistent community interest to avoid being archived?

It cares enough to ship it on VS, and still pay salaries that keep it going.

I expect it to fade into oblivion the day Microsoft decides to drop it.

Those foundation members will hardly keep it relevant, once it becomes yet another third party language on .NET ecosystem.

Relying on Microsoft’s .NET is not what a lot of us would want to do, especially when it comes to libre software.

To me .Net seems the most powerful thing to make a relatively esoteric language practically useful in the real life. Compiling to .Net gives a really solid ground for free. Compiling to JavaScript is a great option but the JavaScript landscape seems way less stable and this way harder to support.

But you have to rely on Mono or .NET Core for Linux which isn’t something many want to put on their servers or desktops.

Is there any legitimate reason to avoid having it?