Why F#?

If you’ve been following along with my posts over the past six months or so you can probably imagine that I’ve been asked some variation of this post’s title more than a few times. One question that I keep getting is why I chose F# over some other functional languages like Haskell, Erlang, or Scala. The problem with that question though is that it’s predicated on the assumption that I actually set out to learn a functional language. The truth is that moving to F# was more of a long but natural progression from C# rather than a conscious decision.

The story begins about two and a half years ago. I had pretty much burned out and was deep into what I can only begin to describe as a stagnation coma. I stopped attending user group meetings; I cut way back on reading; I pretty much stopped…