I'm surprised people care about the syntax... that's pretty much the least important part of the language.

I've got a few issues with OCaml

1. The standard library is inconsistent. Different projects use different alternatives and it's annoying to switch between then.

2. Concurrency using Lwt/Async. Monads feel more ad-hoc in OCaml than Haskell because there's no type classes and again no consensus on how it should be done. Some projects use tons of variation of `>>=`, other use `let%bind`. Again, no clear consensus and reliance on external libraries which aren't always well documented. I find code relying too much on monads to be much less elegant and simple that plain OCaml.

3. "includes". I tend to get lost in codebase which abuse includes.

4. It's a small community. If you want to work on "real world" stuff, most likely you will stumble into tooling/libraries issues. Not all of these things are very mature or documented and they're evolving fast.

I'm wondering if F# suffers from the same issues.

> I'm surprised people care about the syntax... that's pretty much the least important part of the language.

Eh, I don't think I can agree. There are definitely more important things about a language than syntax, but a language with a great syntax can be a lot more enjoyable to use, particularly when reading a lot of code. Prior to learning Ruby I would have agreed with you, but since Ruby and Elixir, the syntax adds much to my enjoyment of working with the language. When I think of ES7 v. ES5 I feel the same way as well. You can do everything in ES5, but in ES7 the syntactical sugar makes it so much more enjoyable.

Interesting, because I find Elixir’s syntax to be rather busy, especially coming to it from F#. I love Elixir and Erlang, but Ruby’s influence on Elixir is probably my least favorite thing about Elixir.

To be frank, any language's syntax is rather busy compared to F#. That language is setting the bar how beautifully a language can look. I don't know of any that comes close, not even Haskell or Python...

I definitely agree. F# is honestly the best designed modern language, in my opinion. I use it for most of my side projects.

It sounds like I need to look into F# a bit. Any advice on where to start for an experienced dev new to F#?

And that's a good question. I have basically every book written on F#, but I can't say I have ever used them for anything more than reference.

The official docs/guide/reference are actually really good, and I refer to them a lot when using some feature I'm not familiar with: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/what-is-fshar...

F# For Fun and Profit is well-known, but I can't say I use it a lot: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

The same author's (Scott Wlaschin) book is very good: https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-func...

As for books, I have always liked:

* Functional Programming Using F# by Hansen and Rischel (might be too simple if you are already comfortable with functional programming and is out of date every now and then with changes to F# that's happened)

* Expert F# 4.0 by Don Syme and others (contains a lot of nice things by the designer of F#

One of the latest books is Stylish F# 6: Crafting Elegant Functional Code for .NET 6 by Kit Eason. I have the first edition but haven't read it.

My personal recommendation is to take the approach of type/domain driven design. That is, I start off every F# module the same:

1. Define my types with discriminated unions, records, type aliases (such as for tuples) or single case discriminated unions. Use classes when necessary but try to prefer the more functional types.

2. Start writing functions against these.

And that's basically it. One thing to recognize with F# is that it mixes OOP rather nicely. Even discriminated unions and records, which are immutable, can have members defined on them, including operator overloading (something F# is pretty good about). They can even implement interfaces and be defined with generic types, which is also nice and powerful.

I have some projects that might of interest, since they're simple enough and illustrate the above process.

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

https://github.com/bmitc/nand2tetris

Lastly, I'd suggest just starting up some projects. You could also take the Programming Languages course on Coursera by Dan Grossman. Part A uses SML, and you could port the examples and homework solutions to F# (I did so when I took the course). I also take books written for other languages and port the code to F#, usually taking a more idiomatic functional style. .NET Interactive notebooks (https://github.com/dotnet/interactive) are a great way to get started. You just need to install the .NET 6 SDK (which gets you F#) and then install the .NET Interactive Notebook extension in VS Code. That's it. There is also the book The Little MLer which gets people comfortable with discriminated unions (sum types), and I used the book and ported the examples to F#. I need to go back and finish that annotation project (https://github.com/bmitc/the-little-fsharper). I'll probably convert the script files to .NET Interactive notebooks if I do.