Increase F# engagement via .fsx and interactive usage

[jkone27]

Increase F# engagement via .fsx and interactive usage

Description

ask microsoft to invest more in F# given rust and ocaml recent success stories, and similarity to python

• Microsoft marketing of F# via streamers/influencers/dotnet community as well?

• How to engage youth (dev, streamers, twitch etc, internet memes etc) and academia in trying F#

• new learning material in official microsoft portal for dotnet interactive

Motivation and impact

*Why is this proposal or question important?
-->

1. python is the most used lang in the world, intro to F# should match closely intro to python, which is an interactive lang with a REPL and scripts. Youth
2. youth spends most of time on streaming and social platforms, few people on twitch/youtube/etc are important resources for peers in recent times

*Who will benefit from it and in which way?
--> youth, schools, educators, academia, startups, everyone eventually?

*What is the impact of this question or proposal resolution?
--> increase F# accessibility over general dotnet tools, simplify its accessibility for starters and new users.

Why we can't afford not to do it?
--> not sure, would require some content investment if possible, ideally professional content creators that already have remarkable success in the industry should help create traction, code influencers etc... ? e.g. fireship io

Proposed solution and alternatives

How much work/effort do you think it will take? --> months?

possible ideas

• improve dotnet interactive and F# docs, now is not very clear how to get started with .fsx and dotnet interactive, unless you know, as it's not a suggested option for getting started, whilst it should be for most people probably (easier that dotnet new and fsproj over-complexity)

• getting started videos from official microsoft learn resources with help of microsoft content creators (C# content is many times much better in quality and money invested clearly...), can microsoft spend some resources on getting started videos for .fsx with ionide and F# interactive

• create docs for F# for python developers as python is the most used langauge across schools and academia and not only

• Are there any alternatives to this idea already?* keep using dotnet new as suggested starting point... but i think casts a shadow in the great benefit of F# interactive and scripting for beginners, who do not need at all to see an fsproj or an [], reduces cognitive load for begineers.

Drawbacks

[drawbacks]: not many as it's mostly a doc adjustment and more content for learning F#