Yes, I've never been greatly enamoured of Java itself, but the JVM truly is a superb piece of work. Your loss I suppose, but if you want to largely stay in the

Yes, I've never been greatly enamoured of Java itself, but the JVM truly is a superb piece of work. Your loss I suppose, but if you want to largely stay in the MS ecosystem, why not check-out F#? It draws heavily from ML/OCAML and is MS supported on .NET and in VS. F# seems like a safe choice for functional programming in an MS oriented shop.