The inclusion of F# in Visual Studio 2010 will help greatly in bringing function programming to the "real world".
By
Jonathan Rascher
on February 05, 2010
After many years as just another one of Microsoft's research projects, F# is slated for inclusion in the soon-to-be-released Visual Studio 2010. This means that a huge number of developers—many of whom, like myself, had never coded in a functional language before F#—will suddenly gain access to the wonderful world of functional programming within the familiar comforts (or familiar discomforts, as it may sometimes be) of the CLR. In my opinion, this can only be a good thing which will be of significant benefit to both .NET developers and functional programming aficionados.
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Discussion (5)
Deends on what "greatly" and "real world" mean. Installing Common Lisp and Scheme environments isn't hard on a Debian machine.
That's a good point. I guess maybe I should've said "the business world", or something like that.
Debian is a favourite in the business world; its long testing process and long-life stable feature set are ideal for many business schedules.
It looks like F# is drawing users away from Ocaml. It'll be interesting to see what that means for the future of Ocaml.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=f%23,+ocaml,+erlang,+haskell
On the other hand, if we get a lot more programmers trying out functional programming who otherwise wouldn't have, I think that's a good thing.
bignose: Another good point. However, I suspect many shops are too Windows-focused (for whatever reason) to consider Debian for anything other than possibly a Web server.
Elihu: It looks like F# is drawing users away from Ocaml.
I'm not sure about that. From the link you posted, it appears that Ocaml searches have been on a slow but steady decline for some time before F# was announced as an official part of Visual Studio. (Also, FWIW, those Haskell numbers appear to be inflated by things other than the programming language.)