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Will F# ever be a mainstream language like C# is? Or will it remain a niche language?
Do you foresee any clients coming to you with projects executed in F#?
Will a professional programmer be able to make a living from F#. What sort of demand do you predict for F# programmers?
Kind regards,
There are people making a living out of functional programming today. For examples, see the commercial users of functional programming workshop which is being held each year.
For the first version of F#, Microsoft is targetting engineering, mathematical, financial and data-processing applications (if I remember correctly). Whether that is a niche or not depends on your perspective 🙂 but it seems like a reasonable market.
Thanks to F#’s excellent .NET integration you can, to a large extent, choose to make your projects using F#. What should your client care. If you get a competitive advantage from that with respect to C# programmers, maybe you’d better hope F# does not hit the mainstream…
Lastly, certainly F# (and Scala) are indicators that at least functional programming will become “more mainstream”. But when is a language considered mainstream? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are many many more lines of code in C and COBOL out there than C#,VB and Java combined. So from a C programmer’s perspective, C# is a niche language. I think programming languages, thanks to virtual machines, are becoming more diversified in general (think also Ruby, Python and Haskell, for example, not taking into account all the smaller languages like Clojure, Ioke,…).