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Got stats on F# download rate or adoption?
f#

Anyone have stats on how is the F# community growing?

I recently wrote to folks at TIOBE index, but have not gotten any reply yet. Maybe the good people at Microsoft would like to share some stats, please?

I am just curious. I do not know how others feel about this language, but I think it is the best thing that is happening to me since 1991.

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Hi dde,

Hard stats will always be whatever you want them to be, but we've been seeing a lot of community growth this year in forums and blogs. We've also been seeing F# jobs (and jobs seeking F# skills), and commercial adoption from a number of places, some large, some small.

Growing the community depends on improving F#. The F# team at Microsoft (both Research and Developer Division) understand that the research release of F# was not usable for large scale commercial software projects, e.g. because the lack of a really usable project system. We're addressing the issues behind this in our CTP release.

Looking forward, I expect we'll see a real growth in F#'s role as a productivity tool in applied functional programming. What pleases me most is when we get people telling us that they enjoy their work more as a result of using F#, just like you just did :-)

Kind regards

Don

By on 8/5/2008 3:08 PM ()

BTW will F# be included out of the box in the next version of Visual Studio? I remember reading this somewhere but I'm not really sure. It may be just for IronPython and IronRuby or none at all. This will be a big push in adoption.

By on 8/8/2008 1:54 AM ()

Thanks Don.

Yes. I am sure you must be experiencing growth. And, somewhere I read (I think sys-con web site) this year and the next are the years of functional programming. I have also seen a job post, some company at Wall Street looking for a F# developer, willing to pay a rather large six figure amount per year.

Well, just for sharing, I am researching language popularity by country. I may get some help from TIOBE. I asked them to include a country variable. I received a reply from Paul Jansen: they will try to figure out how to add country variable to their index. Here are some questions I ask myself:

  • What countries have higher number of developers on this and that language?
  • Where should a company look for outsource based on language adoption?
  • What languages are being largely adopted by India, China and Brazil (emerging markets) ?
  • What countries are largely adopting functional programming languages?

I think there is value in knowing those answers from an economic stand point.

Regards,

José

By on 8/6/2008 12:47 AM ()

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