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Comment by lclarkmichalek | Hacker News Reader

Well IIRC, he's employed by Microsoft Research, which is not really the same as Microsoft proper. And they have used some concepts that are core to Haskell, such as LINQ being a monad, and F# is definitely related (though I don't know if that's an official Microsoft language).

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* (though I don't know if that's an official Microsoft language)*

It is. When you launch Visual Studio >= 2010 it's there alongside C# in the Project Creation wizard.

I think F# is largely based on OCaml. I'm not sure what'd make a language official; MS does the development work on it, so I guess that'd be a yes on officialdom?

To be more precise, F# is based on the non-OO parts of Caml, with a completely different object system so it would be be compatible with .Net objects from other languages such as C#.

IIRC, the original research was going to be into making Haskell for .Net, but there were enough issues (in particular, being purely functional makes interop with C# and the existing .Net libraries radically more difficult) that ML seemed like a better fit.

Ah, thanks. I was going on a vague memory of something read a while back. I wasn't entirely wrong - 40% maybe - so that's nice.

Sure it is, it is even listed on the official Visual Studio page:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh388569

Microsoft also sponsors Haskell and OCaml research via Microsoft Research centers.

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