Most of Microsoft technologies customers are orthodox enterprise companies. They're still using VB and SourceSafe and will not be attracted by ML-like language.

Most of Microsoft technologies customers are orthodox enterprise companies. They're still using VB and SourceSafe and will not be attracted by ML-like language. So Microsoft is marketing F# cautiously. But unlike Java world where J2EE suits and Scala/Clojure hipsters coexist (but hugely separated), .NET is in just beginning of transition from Windows-only Visual Studio-only. It's hard to convince people outside of old Windows Server .NET camp to even try these technologies. Recently I tried F#: build process is still painful, involving msbuild files designed for IDE first, build system second, based on XML, with reverse slashes and absolute paths, reminded me of mix between Windows Registry and Apache Ant. MSDN is painful and enterprisey, with 5-10 second page load times. F# is quite nice (much cleaner and simplier than Scala for example) but still not feels really great. I can't figure out how to do basic polymorphism in it: someone recommended to use classes and interfaces but I don't want OOP at all. Standard library has few polymorphism too: Seq.map, List.map, Set.map. Records are great but type inference behaves strangely.