In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone. These new users came from across the globe – 38% from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA.

This is a significant increase compared to last year, when 1.5M new users signed up every day. We've had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different.

People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users.

With half a billion active users and accelerating growth, Telegram has become the largest refuge for those seeking a communication platform committed to privacy and security. We take this responsibility very seriously. We won’t let you down.

Those of you who have used Telegram…

Python is everywhere. It's used for web development, data scripting and exploration, and it is the primary language used for machine learning.

However, Python also suffers some problems in these domains: it lacks static types, setting up and upgrading environments is not straightforward and error-prone, and it doesn't lend itself well to functional programming paradigms despite one of its core success areas - machine learning - being very function-oriented. Despite these issues, Python is still very productive and has an incredible tooling and library ecosystem that can be leveraged by other languages.

F# solves many of the problems that Python developers have to live with. It has static types that don't sacrifice the brevity that Python developers love. F# has incredible support for web development. Setting up development and deployment environments with F# and .NET Core is simple, straightforward, and predictable. F# is also a functional programming language with advanced tools for abstraction that allow…