Happy 10th birthday language-ext!

[louthy]

Language-ext turns 10 years old today. My mission to bring the benefits of pure functional programming to C# has been quite a journey.

• Over a million lines of code written
• Nu-get package downloaded 19 million times
• 6000 downloads per day

I originally set out to bring stability to a large 10 million LOC SaaS project I was working on, I never expected the success it has become.

Thank you to all of the contributors and those who donate financially to the project. It might not be enough for me to work full time on the project, but it's very much appreciated all the same. It makes me understand that there are people out there that value what I am doing and helps keep me motivated, so thank you very much!

Version 5, which has been in beta for the past 6 months or so, brings higher-kinded traits to C# and that's opening up so many more opportunities for effective pure-FP in C# and is something I'm super excited about. It will hopefully have a full release by the end of the year.

It has been a labour of love for sure and some people certainly don't see the point, which is fine, but I came to the conclusion a while back that (as C# gains more FP features) the language + the library is actually a really effective way to do functional programming.

C# has a best-in-class compiler and best-in-class tooling. It also has first-class support for monads (LINQ). With a keen focus on providing the types and functions that are needed to write pure, declarative, code - we get the best of both worlds. C# + language-ext certainly isn't Haskell, but it's up there with Scala, and in my humble opinion, better than F# in its effectiveness (don't hate me F# fans!)

The goal is to make it into a Scala Cats-like FP community within the wider C# community. That may still be a ways off, but it's certainly happening.

Thank you all for the support, here's to the next 10 years!

Cheers,

Paul