this is also a good article on the topic: comparing-scala-to-fsharp
as always, best way is to try for yourself!
- Scala has no ML type inference, and never will, and has very sad curly braces like C languages used just for scoping.
- F# doesnt have higher order kinds (scala/haskell pp brag a lot a about it) also for a language design choice, the F# lang directive thought wasn't really needed in 99% of cases of real day to day programming and would confuse people (which indeed it does most of times)
- F# uses curly braces for CE (Computation expressions) giving curly braces a total new meaning and dignity, for building monadic operations in the best expressive way ever. (see task, async, query, etc..)
- has curly braces for scoping and makes OO pp feel more at "home"
- JVM is "the big guy" in runtimesthe industry, but JVM world brags about popularity quite a lot (more than quality). Luckilly Python is now the most popular language and Java is going down day by day..
- NET platform is an amazing runtime and people should get updated not talk about 20 years ago NET as Microsoft and open source DOTNET foundation did huuuuuge improvements on the area, so huge now it competes with GO and RUST and low level languages on performance in many many areas. cannot be said for JVM.
- package management onin JVM(maven) and nodejs(npm) is a mess andmore complicated...
- package management in NET works like a charm and is amazing, plus nuget is part of the dotnet tooling, not an "external thing" anymore, so dependencies are part of your .fsproj or a line in your script .fsx amazing.
Pros onof F#:
- it's a NET6 language runs everywhere part of the NET6 platform
- has scripting and a repl and can be used like python/nodejs/bash
- has type providers and the |> pipe operator, making it awesome to work with collections and data
- has computation expressions, a very beautiful and simple way to write custom "monadic operations" in F# (not an expert here)
- F#6 supports natively Task
- runs on aspnetcore easilly with beautiful libraries such as Giraffe/Saturn/Falco
- looks much closer to javascript and is much more readeable than scala
- transpiles to javascript with Fable compiler
- is awesome and the F# community is great
- is based on many years of academic research and 25+ years of OCAML as is an ocaml implementation for .NET, making it one of the best functional languages available today
- doesnt (yet?) run on the JVM, but is both a .NET language and a node.js language
- has automatic type generalization and everything is curriable
- is supported on the bestvery good IDEs of the world : VsCode, Rider, VisualStudio
- is opensource 100% and since long time
- influences many languages (like C# and Typescript)
- F# Synthax is more accessible and better as an entry level language too (~python) for people which never started programming