Yesterday Somasegar made some big announcements about the F# programming language. F# is originally a Microsoft Research project coming out of the Cambridge Research lab. Microsoft have decided to take the project forward and "productize" F#. This means that F# is becoming a first class citizen on .NET and in Visual Studio. Soma didn't mention which version F# is going to make it into, but I don't expect them to have anything ready for Visual Studio 2008. Perhaps an intermediate release and a full integration in version 2008+1? One could only speculate...

F# is a functional programming language with roots in ML and draws inspiration from languages like Python, Matlab, C#, Haskell, Scheme and more. I've previously blogged about the importance of learning new programming languages and ideas in my "learn the language, live the lifestyle" post, and one of the most rewarding courses of my bachelors degree from NTNU was a functional programming course in Scheme. The fact that Microsoft is bringing both dynamic (Ruby and Python) and functional (F#) languages  to the .NET is great news for developers. We can use the right language for our problem domain, while still leveraging the .NET framework or any other .NET component we might have written. A typical scenario for F# might be to implement a domain problem described in mathematical notation in F# and compile it into a .NET assembly, and then use other .NET languages to expose this functionality through some UI or service.

You learn more about F# over at the Don Syme's blog or the project site up on MSDN.