Microsoft doesn't matter much anymore, but F# will be integrated to Visual Studio 2010, bringing a very powerful functional language to all .net/mono coders. An

Microsoft doesn't matter much anymore, but F# will be integrated to Visual Studio 2010, bringing a very powerful functional language to all .net/mono coders. And I'm sure there are quite a lot of them. So the argument of lack of decent library or nice IDE will fall apart (and I heard it quite a lot) : we'll see how well F# fare on the .net scene. I'm quite enthusiastic about it, since F# is actually a very nice functional language, with strong infered typing. It's basically OCaml running on .net/mono. I've rewritten C# code in F#, and the latter is definitely much more concise than the former... Strong typing is actually quite nice too. For instance a small neat effect : it prevents any kind of null pointer exception, null being a type in itself. Though sometimes strong-typing gets in the way and I wish it had duck-typing... That said Microsoft doesn't seem to advocate the use of F# for GUI... They still recommend using C#, or the ugly thing that has Basic in its name for doing so.