The Early History of F# [pdf]
I&#x27;ve recently become interested in F# after I saw its use in a bunch of videos by Scott Walashin. I came across his talks, and subsequently his blog, as I&#x27;m getting more into functional programming and he has some awesome content.<p>I use Javascript&#x2F;Typescript professionally and I really like both of them. F# though has a minimalism in its design that is very appealing. Code I write in F# feels a lot less cluttered as opposed to the same function in Javascript&#x2F;Typescript. This minimalism seems to be part of the language design with some following specific examples.<p>- `let` is used to declare variables and functions.<p>- The last statement in a function is implicitly the return value.<p>- The type safety&#x2F;mechanism is great and seems to be extremely similar to Typescript&#x27;s so its easy to pick up for me (I&#x27;m not sure which came first or if there&#x27;s a relationship but it certainly wouldn&#x27;t surprise me).<p>This along with some classic functional ideas that are built in like immutability by default, automatic currying of functions etc all allow for a language that seems be made to get out of the way. That&#x27;s a very compelling idea for a language design to me that I previously haven&#x27;t seen.<p>Because functions and variables are both declared with let, perceiving functions as data kind of finally clicked for me since I first heard that concept 3 or so years ago. Another feature was to not require a semicolon as a line terminator and instead use it for another meaning as a separator. While JS doesn&#x27;t require semicolons at the end of a line, its reserved for that purpose.<p>Overall, I find F#  to be a refreshing language (from javascript, python, java and even others like Rust or Go but I haven&#x27;t used those as much so don&#x27;t want to make bigger claims) and I&#x27;m glad to see a post like this on HN almost like validation of a community behind the language. I&#x27;d be curious to get a feel for some companies that actively use it as well.<p>I also love that there&#x27;s a compiler for F# to Javascript so I can use it to build front end code as I learn the language. Its pretty incredible we can do cross compilation of high level languages like this and with others like Rust and Go to wasm etc<p>Edit: formatting of bullet points