Edit: This is probably too negative of a comment. It's just years of frustration with MS coming out, that's all. I've not got much inside knowledge. I was an M

Edit: This is probably too negative of a comment. It's just years of frustration with MS coming out, that's all. I've not got much inside knowledge. I was an MVP 2003-2005 on C# then CLR and Security. I wasn't very knowledgeable back then, but I don't recall any push for FP style, at all. I think the fact that C# originally didn't have lambdas, then added them with an 8-character keyword says enough. Implementing better generics later? I doubt it. There's been no CLR changes since v2, as far as the type system or IL goes. So that's 10 years, no additions, just added tweaks here and there. Hell, even now, .NET Native relies on source-level transformations, instead of being implemented at the IL-level. They've been hyping Rosyln. Great. One famous problem with C#'s compiler is that its design made it very hard to add type inference consistently to the language[1]. They rewrote the compiler, did they fix that? Nope. Even worse: My watch says it's 2015, but VS/C# still doesn't ship a REPL. Come on. (Yeah maybe "C# Interactive" will show up some day now that 2015 has RTM'd. But not today.) The core of my complaint is that they have a mindset of implementing things as hard-coded scenarios, versus general purpose features. Async. Dynamic. Duck typing. Operators. Even the lambda syntax being ambiguous between expressions and code. Why? Cause they choose an end-user scenario, e.g. LINQ, then implemented just what they need to get that scenario done. That lacks elegance. It adds conceptual overhead. Java has more popularity because MS decided to shun non-Windows. Essentially no one prefers Java-the-language over C#, but Windows-only is a nonstarter in many cases. My IE comment is saying that, like IE, MS has removed resources and the drive to seriously improve its language tech, as there are no real competitors in their space, language-wise. 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-no-var-on-fields.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-n... P.S. I still think C# is a good language in relative terms and they have brilliant people doing great work on it. And the polish of the tooling - wow, yeah it's amazing. I'm just disappointed that MS doesn't seem to be interested in really upping-the-ante and being a leader here. F# is basically a "best-of-breed" language that'd put them solidly ahead, yet they neglect it.