I know that the Azure team is playing up F#'s role in developing worker roles for HPC and that F# is designed to work in concert with Dryad, which is the .NET M

I know that the Azure team is playing up F#'s role in developing worker roles for HPC and that F# is designed to work in concert with Dryad, which is the .NET MapReduce engine developed by MSR, see http://weblogs.asp.net/podwysocki/archive/2009/03/03/exploring-mapreduce-with-f.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/podwysocki/archive/2009/03/03/explori... I'd argue that F# is marketed the way it is because it doesn't have a business group with a marketing budget yet or a real evangelism team - it's really the guys at Microsoft Research who are driving its adoption, and they happen to be scientists and mathematicians. There's a lot of room for trailblazers who want to show off how to use it more everyday scenarios and not just math / science scenarios.