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I understand where you're coming from, but I'd challenge your dismissal of that note by noting how seemingly powerful a large ecosystem of available packages is

I understand where you're coming from, but I'd challenge your dismissal of that note by noting how seemingly powerful a large ecosystem of available packages is when onboarding people to an ecosystem. I don't think Scala, Kotlin, or Clojure would have had as much adoption if they hadn't had access to the JVM ecosystem of libraries available. While it's not the only benefit, I think one could just point at the usage of OCaml as the alternative to F#. While both are in the lower percentages of language popularity/usage, I've worked with at least 50 (dozens lol) people who were paid to write production F#.

djtango 1y ago
After reading Paul Biggar's experiences with OCaml when building darklang, and the importance of ecosystem when building distributed systems in the cloud, I don't think I'd ever build a business on a non-hosted functional language. There are some hefty businesses built on top of OCaml so it definitely can be done, but it sounds too expensive to get a small business up and running if the code itself isn't the product. So that basically leaves Scala, Clojure and F#
- cosmos64 1y ago
  Depends on the use case. Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam are hosted on their own platform, and lots of use cases can be covered that way. Also, Flix is a thing, and some Scheme/CommonLisp/StandardML implementations compile to C. Ecosystem there. Purescript, Gleam and others compile to JS. Oh, and WebAssembly becomes valuable as compilation target as well. Also: Kotlin is almost a functional first language like F#