This is the full interview from my discussion with Phillip Carter in my weekly (free!) newsletter, The .NET Stacks. Consider subscribing today!

Last week, we talked to Isaac Abraham about F## from a C## developer’s perspective. This week, I’m excited to get more F## perspectives from Phillip Carter. Phillip is a busy guy at Microsoft but a big part of his role as a Program Manager is overseeing F## and its tooling.

In this interview, we talk to Phillip about Microsoft F## support, F## tooling (and how it might compare to C#), good advice for learning F#, and more.

Can you talk about what you’ve done at Microsoft, and how you landed on F#?Permalink

I spent some time bouncing around on various projects related to shipping .NET Core 1.0 for my first year-ish at Microsoft. A lot of it was me doing very little in the early days, since there was little for an entry-level PM to do. But I did find that that the Docs team needed help and so I ended up writing a good portion of the .NET docs that exist on docs.microsoft.com today. Some of the information architecture I contributed to is still present there today.

I got the F## gig because I had an interest in F## and the current PM was leaving for a different team. Rather than let it sit without a PM for an indeterminate amount of time, everyone agreed that I should take the position. Always better to have someone who’s interested in the space assume some responsibility than have nobody do it, right? I’ve been working on F## at Microsoft ever since.

Do you feel F## gets the recognition and attention at Microsoft it deserves?Permalink

This is always a fun question.

Many F## programmers would emphatically proclaim, “No!” and it’s of course a meme that Microsoft Doesn’t Care About F## or whatever. But the reality is that like all other functional programming languages, F## is a niche in terms of adoption, and it is likely to stay a niche if you compare it to the likes of C#, Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript.

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