F#

[bogeyman]

Fair dos.

I'm finding it fun more because it's a different way of thinking, and I think it could be beneficial to furthering skills in C#.

C# is certainly heading in a functional direction with the introduction of lambda expressions etc, and there's even more functional stuff in 4.0. I think as time goes on, the 'best bits' of F# are likely to be sucked into C.

Yes. Mucked about with Lambdas but seems pretty alien to my way of doing things. Probably that's an indication of the programming model of the future though.

Software devs in 2050 will be laughing at our primitive object models - well, except for the COBOL programmers, who will still be productively employed

[d000hg]

Ok.

Let's pretend.

Let's pretend I'm your PM or line manager.

What business case would you put for using F# (or Haskell, or some other never-used-in-real-world-language)?

Haskell IS used commercially (a bit), it's been around for nearly 20 years after all.

If you were working on something that used lots of very involved algorithms and a lot of concurrency, a functional language could be a reasonable choice... if you can find anyone to program it.