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The author lists F# as not IDE friendly. I find this categorization inaccurate.

F# works great with Visual Studio, and especially well with intellisense.

F# was designed as industrial language from the beginning, and high quality tooling is a large part of that.

It might just be me, though, maybe other people use the language in ways that don't work that well there.



They also admit that it is better than average here: https://keli-language.gitbook.io/doc/specification/chapter-1...

> Keli is created to overcome a problem that is almost undeniable in every functional programming languages: the lack of proper IDE incorporation (perhaps except F#). In short, Keli can be viewed as an attempt to assimilate the Smalltalk's syntactic model into a functional programming environment.


The only issue with F# is that it is a bit the black swan of Microsoft languages on .NET, so it doesn't get all the toys that C#, VB.NET and even C++/CLI get to play with.


I don't think F# needs toys, though. The language is so well put together you don't miss much IDE assist anyway, except to point to you where your code will have problems compiling.


Sure it does, a language alone isn't much help if it only gets a tiny slice of the ecosystem.

No .NET Native, GUI designers, WCF/gRPC, EF designers, Blend, WinUI tooling, ASP.NET templates,... hinders adoption at corporate level.


My experience is that, compared to most functional languages, F# has a great IDE experience in Rider, Visual Studio and VS Code. But when compared to big industry focused languages, like C# and Java, tooling is middling at best.

Ironically, despite .NET core being an excellent runtime, it suffers stigma from being assumed to be too tied to Microsoft platforms. This means, depending on your angle, F# lacking specialized ties to the Windows specific tooling you mention need not be considered a disadvantage.


I'm told F# is where the toys come from.


I think you mean black sheep


I second this. F# is quite IDE friendly, and auto completion works great. Additionally much of the .NET tooling (with the exception of C# specific refactoring tools) are CIL / bytecode level and independent of CLR language. This is one of the reasons having a polyglot solution of C# and F# projects is possible and with (mostly) seamless interop - all the same bytecode in the end.




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