Reflecting on F# in 2017

2017 has been a very exciting year for F#.

To begin, F# has grown to be bigger than ever, at least as far as we can measure, through product telemetry, twitter activity, GitHub activity, and F# Software Foundation activity.

• Active unique users of F# we can measure are in the tens of thousands.
• Measured unique users of Visual Studio Code with Ionide increased by over 50% this year, to become far larger than ever.
• Measured unique users of Visual Studio who use F# increased by over 20% since last year to be larger than ever, despite quality issues earlier in the year that we believe have inhibited growth.
• Much of the measured growth coincides with the release of .NET Core 2.0, which has shown significant interest in the F# community.

Telemetry is a complicated topic, and we do not try to account for existing users who are using F# in environments without telemetry, so it’s never perfect. Actual usage of F# in the world is strictly higher than what we can measure.

But numbers and metrics are limited, because they tell only a small part of the story. I’ll attempt to summarize some of the major things that happened for F# this year.

• F# 4.1 was released, most notably as the first version of the language with .NET Core support, and has had multiple updates since its initial release.
• Visual Studio 2017 and its F# tooling shipped five major updates, including support for .NET Core and .NET Standard projects.
• Incredible members of the F# community, such as Vasily Kirichenko, Saul Rennison, Anh-Dung Phan, Steffen Forkmann, and others made significant improvements to our Visual Studio 2017 F# tooling including adding a dizzying array of features.
• F# is now installed into Visual Studio 2017 by default if you are installing .NET Core.
• F# tooling in Visual Studio 2017 now has a nightly release channel.
• Visual Studio for Mac launched, with F# support in-box, and it has continually improved throughout the year.
• Azure Functions now supports F#, with even better things coming soon.
• Azure Notebooks now supports F#.
• FSharp.Core is now the official package for the F# core library.
• FSharp.Compiler.Tools is now the official place where the F# Compiler SDK is deployed, and is the recommended way to attain the SDK
• F# is now in-band with the .NET Core SDK.
• We expanded our team and hired Will at the end of the year!
• The F# language suggestions and F# RFC repositories are now the official place for F# language and tooling evolution.
• Ionide, a plugin suite that turns Visual Studio Code into a fully-featured F# IDE, shipped at least 100 releases (or 200; jeez, it’s so many).
• Paket, the awesome NuGet client used in many F# projects, seemingly shipped billions of releases this year.
• JetBrains Rider shipped with excellent and ever-improving F# support.
• Much of the F# OSS ecosystem has migrated to .NET Standard and .NET Core (which represents an incredible amount of work on the part of the maintainers).
• Suave and Giraffe emerged as two dominant libraries to use when writing web services on .NET Core, with Freya as a brilliant alternative that everyone should try out as well.
• Fable rapidly evolved from an interesting project with potential into an impressive and fully-fledged alternative for JavaScript in the browser, allowing you to write Full-Stack F# applications.
• The F# Software Foundation(FSSF) has continued its steady growth and become one of the best organizations to be a part of if you’re just beginning with F#.
• The FSSF launched its diversity program and had another strong round of its free mentorship program.
• OpenFSharp was created and sold out (quickly and despite low-key advertisement), which gets me all kinds of excited about F# in the U.S.
• F# had a notable presence at //Build 2017, NDC conferences, .NET Conf, and other Functional Programming conferences.

Wew, that’s a lot. I probably missed some things that matter to people, so please let me know if you feel I should list something.

If there’s a single thing I feel most when looking at the above list, it’s pride. Not just in myself or my immediate colleagues, but in the members of the F# community who have done so many incredible things across such a wide spectrum of the entire F# ecosystem. Every single person involved in the above items should feel proud of themselves and their accomplishments. I’m American, and thus prone to superlatives, but you are all rock stars and I’m humbled to work with you all.

I’d also like to mention a few of the things that matter to me on a more personal level:

• I was one honored to be one of the Community Heros announced at OpenFSharp:

• I got to stay up until 3:30 a.m. after OpenFSharp talking all kinds of craziness over beers with Rich Minerich, Dmitry Morozov, Gien Verschatse, Mathias Brandewinder, Chet Husk, Cezary Wojcik, Marnee Dearman, and Marcus Griep. Mathias was kind enough to provide his apartment as the venue for these shenanigans.
• I got to hang out with Krzysztof Cieślak, Tomas Petricek, Evelina Gabasova, Marcus Griep, Riccardo Terrell, Gien Verschatse, Mark Gray, Paulmichael Blasucci, Enrico Sada, Alfonso Garcia-Caro, Jérémie Chassaing, and others in Cambridge and London. Beer, food, taking over a bar, cavorting around each city, enjoying the sunshine, talking smack about Golang, and just about everything else happened. So much fun.
• I got to witness the Pink Pezi himself, Ross McKinlay, steal Eirik Tsarpalis’ badge at F# eXchange, and then walk around calling himself a Greek programmer named Eirik. Ross, will there be an EirikTsarpalisProvider Type Provider library I can use some day? Will it only provide types named “Ross”, or will it also provide types named “Eirik”?
• I was one of the honored few to be cow-herded, Don Syme style, by Andrea Magnorsky to leave the F# eXchange venue. Hup hup!
• I got to have Andrea Magnorsky pull me aside at F# eXchange for a wonderful and serious conversation about the sorts of things the community needed to hear from me at the conference and beyond. Oh, and she gave me a FunctionalCat sticker for my laptop, which I proudly display to this day!
• I got to meet Scott Wlaschin, whose prolific blogging taught me why F# is so great when I was still a college student in 2014.
• I got to watch Alfonso Garcia Caro launch Fable 1.0, code-named Narumi, and be honored to have him present not once, but twice on Channel9 about Fable.
• I got to hang out, multiple times, with some of the wonderful folks form G-Research while in London.
• I got to engage, daily, with some of the amazing OSS contributors to F# and its ecosystem.
• I got to have Don Syme think numerous suggestions of mine were good ideas. For someone who only got a college degree in June 2015, that’s a pretty big deal me!

I think it’s rare to find a job in my field that is this rewarding. There is a lot of stress involved, and the problems that need solving and issues that need addressing are never simple. But it’s worth it every time.

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