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MSFT had a push towards basic research in the last decade. To do that they needed to hire PhDs and give them some control over what they wanted to work on. Most
by drcode 16y ago
MSFT had a push towards basic research in the last decade. To do that they needed to hire PhDs and give them some control over what they wanted to work on. Most CS PhDs these days want to work in a language with Hindley-Milner type inference, so they created F#.
- scott_s 16y agoCS PhDs who work in the area of programming language design.
- Robin_Message 16y agoNote also that Microsoft employs Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the foremost contributors to the Haskell programming language, so it's not clear that they needed to create F# for language researchers. Although, as Don Syme says in the interview quoted by TomOfTTB, an ML type language mated much more neatly with .NET than Haskell did, so you might still be right.