I believe a functional language would be helpful for the domain my company works in (financial) where we read in a ton of data, do some mathematical processing on it, and then store it again. Something which is fundamentally very parallelizable and not well-suited to extensive object-graphs with state (in my estimation).
As a .NET shop, I immediately thought of F# but I’m wary of the fact that the words “research” are prominently interspersed throughout almost all of the MS materials on it.
Does anyone know if F# is going to be something which MS is going to support going forward or would I be better of trying to convince the powers that be to go with Scheme/Haskell/et al?
It is going to be in visual studio 2k10 as a formal language.
(See e.g.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2008/12/10/fsharp-to-ship-as-part-of-visual-studio-2010.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-beta1-with-f-is-now-available-plus-matching-f-ctp-update-for-vs2008.aspx )