At computer science at the University of Copenhagen F# has been used for the introduction courses the past couple of years, which as far as I know has been a big success, so I'm doubtful of it not being beginner friendly
Mileage is probably not representative when you're in a university setting being taught by professors in an intro course versus a professional trying to use a multitude of the data science libraries and having trouble tying it together. Python has a zillion books published and a large percentage of them are beginner oriented. F# has only a few books and they are almost all for experts.
The community surrounding F# today is very supportive and helpful with people of all experience levels. Compared to when I learned F# in 2010 it is orders of magnitude easier and more social. So many resources: the F# Foundation website http://fsharp.org/ is a good place to start. http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ and the book form of the site's articles on github https://swlaschin.gitbooks.io/fsharpforfunandprofit/content/... has great information for people at all levels. And finally just get on twitter #fsharp to start meeting people in the community.
I've gone through all of those and although it's nice, it is not what I'd call beginner friendly at all. Python has books teaching you to program in Python which is a really good way to learn a programming language. Scott's tutorial using Frankenstein to explain Monads is interesting, but I need to see how to build simple programs and modules first. How does one organize a program using pure FP, or what's the best way to mix in OOP and it is really confusing to learn all the pragmas and compiler directives. I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology, but a lot of example code uses FSI which has to call the modules differently than if you make an executable. I really would love nothing more than F# to be my go to language, but I need a little more help getting there. I realize not all users have this problem though.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one lol. I'd spend top dollar for a beginner's book focusing on creating short 1/2 page programs like guess my number, hangman, plotting graphs...etc and only mix in things like currying and monads later in the book along with C# interop.
I have been teaching OCaml in CS1 at Boston College for 4 years now. Of hundreds of students who went on to learn Java in our CS2 course (joining Python-trained students from other sections of CS1), nearly unanimous happy campers. When OCaml is their first programming language, they're good to go.
