My job has been making a tactical retreat from Scala, and it's really fascinating to look to alternatives like F# and see that they're even less "successful", from an adoption point of view. I'm surprised at how little success even marginally higher-level languages than C# or Java are having.

As you say though, really we've seen a shift in a direction I didn't expect as much, more toward languages that aren't bringing a virtual machine. Even the dialog at work talks about elastic computing where the JVM is less of a dominant player than something that uses fewer resources and starts fast.

Go has really become the poster child for a lot of this momentum in my circles... intentionally not an elaborate language, good ecosystem, good runtime characteristics. I personally don't really want to be moving to Go, but the gulf between status quo and "moves the needle" languages has grown, not shrunk, these last few years, it feels.

I am usually a big critic of Go's design, but if the option is between C or Go, I would rather put up with Go.

F# has suffered from Microsoft not really caring that much, it almost feels that management has repented to have added into Visual Studio 2010, and now mostly carries it around, based on the work of volunteers, with a rather small team.

Even the release notes aren't part of .NET proper,

While VB folks document directly what is changing,

https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/10.0/...

F# notes tell readers to click into yet another link to the F# repo,

https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes/10.0/...

https://fsharp.github.io/fsharp-compiler-docs/release-notes/...