It feels like Microsoft is starting to get more vocal about pushing F#. Worth noting that Visual Studio/Xamarin for Mac is prominently offering F# for Android and iOS out of the box now as well.
It approaches from the other side - I don't care what the language lets me do, but what it doesn't. I think it's quite controversial and the examples are a bit contrived, but I found it really interesting.
C# "Pattern Matching" is little more than destructuring or switch on steroids.
However, much like how the compiler assists you when writing subclasseses so that you've implemented all the required methods, real Pattern Matching (F#) gives you the same guarantees from the compiler that you've handled all the possible cases appropriately. This makes real F# pattern matching much more useful than "switch with destructuring" and helps you grow your programs in a safe way. The C# way has all the same problems as the switch statement which gives no feedback about what cases you've handled.
Exactly. I was exposed to elixir/phoenix and could not help but think "man, typespecs is the best we get? wish this were F#". But alas, all the momentum and mindshare is being sucked up by elixir/phoenix. If F# could replicate that somehow that would be AMAZING.
I don't mean to knock Elixir/Phoenix though. They are very cool and intersting. Erlang/beam is.. interesting. But F#'s tooling is just fantastic.