F# continues to be my favorite programming language but the fact remains that it's relatively niche.

Here we'll dive into the 2024 numbers to see how popular F# is in the software engineering community.

How popular is F#?

We'll be pulling data from a few different sources to figure out F#'s popularity. Each source has its own ranking system and biases so absolute numbers are unlikely to be super accurate but directionally the patterns seem to hold.

Stack Overflow Programming Language Popularity

First we'll look at data from Stack Overflow. Every year they run a dev survey where tens of thousands of developers share what tech they're using and if they like it or not.

The bias for this survey is who actually responds - often it's a small % of the total dev ecosystem and often skews a bit corporate. In fact this year I forgot to participate at all.

According to the Stack Overflow Dev Survey - F# is the 42nd most popular language used by 0.9% of respondents. This is a bit less than 2023 where F# placed 37th with 1.03% usage.

To put this in context I've pulled out some languages that F# is often compared to - whether it's C# (also runs on dotnet) or various functional-first langs.

• C#: 27.1%
• Kotlin: 9.4%

• Scala: 2.6%
• Elixir: 2.1%
• Haskell: 2%
• Clojure: 1.2%
• F#: 0.9%
• OCaml: 0.8%

From these results we can see that F# is certainly not mainstream but it's not that far behind comparable functional-first langs either.

Tiobe Index Programming Language Popularity

Next we'll take a look at rankings from the Tiobe Index. This index is a bit confusing but basically seems to hinge on the amount and rankings of content for that technology on the internet.

For an example of its wonkiness just look at JavaScript in 6th place but TypeScript in 48th - very unlikely that's accurate wrt actual usage.

According to the Tiobe Index F# is the 50th most popular with a 0.14% rating. 50th is the last place they give ratings to so it just eeks in.

Here are ratings for selected other langs for context:

• C#: 5th - 4.98%
• Kotlin: 20th - 0.92%
• Scala: 30th - 0.54%
• Haskell: 34th - 0.47%
• Elixir: 44th - 0.2%
• F#: 50th - 0.14%

• OCaml: Unranked
• Clojure: Unranked

It's hard to tell what exactly these ratings mean but directionally it seems to show similar patterns as Stack Overflow's - F# is not a mainstream language but has average adoption compared to other functional-first langs.

Next

What does this mean for F#? Not much - F# has never been a super popular language but its popularity has remained relatively consistent over the past few years.

I still use F# to build most of my side projects and it's got a very good ecosystem to leverage. So if you're interested in it, it's worth trying out.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• The State of F# (2023)
• How I got interested in F#
• The best way to get started learning and building with F#