F# is the bomb. Once in a while I even consider running ASP on mono so I can use F#, then I realize I'd need a windows box with Visual Studio and decide against it.

Why would you need that? The F# compiler's open source and runs just fine in MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio (or outside of an IDE, for that matter).

Will try MonoDevelop, to be honest the last time I tried MonoDevelop was when the Intel MacBooks were new, and it wouldn't run on OS X.

Downloading MonoDevelop as we speak, thanks for the reminder :)

you can run mvc on mono with nginx.

I've done some fun stuff with Mono and C# but it's significantly more clunky than just apt-get install

What does a virtual machine + language have to do with a package manager?

Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.

That maybe a while ago, like when Ubuntu was 9.0 and you had to compile from source code in order to get sgen? Things are much better now. Since early this year, I've been running a web service written in C# serving one of my iOS apps. That piece of service has been running happily in a tiny VPS for half a year now. Installation of the Mono runtime was an easy apt-get.

Mono is completely installed by default on older versions of Ubuntu (8-11). The runtime with some development tools is installed in 12 and 13. You can get it on any version since 8 with apt-get.

$ sudo apt-get mono-complete $ echo "using System; static class Entry { static void Main() { Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World\"); }}" > hello.cs $ mono-csc hello.cs $ ./hello.exe Hello World

It's much like ruby in that to get everything I wanted I had to go to source, which means jumping through some hoops. That's all.

You could just use OCaml, of which it is an obvious copy. You wouldn't get the whole MS stack, for better or worse.

Don Syme has added some interesting features to F# like type providers, so I think it is OK to say that F# has transcended its OCaml roots to become an interesting language in its own right.

Not to mention the approach to OOP is rather different in F#. It's syntactically and culturally different. Most OCaml programmers I know avoid OOP for the most part, whereas it's embraced to some extent in F#. Seems like a sort of "functional first, but feel free to use objects as you see fit" philosophy in F# versus a "functional always, objects are a failed experiment" philosophy in OCaml.

I don't mean to imply any judgment here, I'm just noting another difference between F# and OCaml.

> It's syntactically and culturally different.

Most people seem to think it's not syntactically very different: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocaml

I mean specifically the syntax for OOP support. Otherwise, much of the syntax is the same.

Absolutely, I have much love for OCaml.