.NET integration is probably the biggest killer feature, because that unlocks official support for most important platforms that you'll need to use. Using AWS or Azure or GCP because your business is moving stuff to a butt provider? You have access to fully-supported SDKs maintained by teams who do that stuff for a living. And so on. .NET also has a spectacular standard library, and with .NET Core, runs _very_ well in any environemnt.
But from a language standpoint, here are three unique features
* Type Providers, which let you generate types based on a data source, and tie compilation to the use of that data being correct
* Active Patterns, which are similar to Haskell's View Patterns, and let you tie some arbitrary functionality that ultimately returns an Option into a pattern for neat pattern matching
* Computation Expressions, which let you express, compose, sequence, etc. monadic and monoidal computations in a convenient syntax that's super easy for newcomers to grok. There is also an RFC and WIP implementation that expands these to support applicative constructs
There's more (Units of Measure, universal quantification via Interfaces, etc.) but these three tend to be something people like a lot.
Thanks, I completely missed to talk about type providers, active patterns and unit of measure, but then the post was already so long lol. I think I'll add other good blog posts which cover all these topics to my final notes!
But from a language standpoint, here are three unique features
* Type Providers, which let you generate types based on a data source, and tie compilation to the use of that data being correct
* Active Patterns, which are similar to Haskell's View Patterns, and let you tie some arbitrary functionality that ultimately returns an Option into a pattern for neat pattern matching
* Computation Expressions, which let you express, compose, sequence, etc. monadic and monoidal computations in a convenient syntax that's super easy for newcomers to grok. There is also an RFC and WIP implementation that expands these to support applicative constructs
There's more (Units of Measure, universal quantification via Interfaces, etc.) but these three tend to be something people like a lot.