As a long-time advocate of functional programming, I was once asked after a talk what is the "best" FP language to learn. Since I'm known as a Haskell/Scala/ML person, I surprised much of the audience by answering that I thought F# was the best entry point. What I did not say, however, was that I think that Windows is a challenging environment for anyone who is used to Linux/Mac -- and this includes the "open source" world in general. I think that Microsoft is a leader in language design, but their platform relevance was slipping for many years. I believe it may be on the upswing (with Xamarin etc). I would encourage you to stick with F# as you will be further along in not only understanding FP, but other modern programming languages, including ones that haven't been invented yet.
>I would encourage you to stick with F# as you will be further along in not only understanding FP, but other modern programming languages, including ones that haven't been invented yet.
Interesting. Why do you say "including languages that haven't been invented yet"? Does F# have some features that are modern / good, but not common in some other current languages, but are likely to be there in future ones?
> I would encourage you to stick with F# as you will be further along in not only understanding FP, but other modern programming languages
Thank you for your kind words!
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have also tried Haskell, but I never managed to move past some basic examples. With F#, at least for now, it seems like I can more easily read/understand even more complex stuff (and one day maybe even write it by myself).
To me, Windows has eclipsed both MacOS and Linux as the best dev environment. It's caught up in shell and the whole ecosystem of tools completely blows away what exists on MacOS and Linux.
Windows is also a lot better than the other two in keyboard shortcut support.
