As somewhat of a functional programming nerd, and a perpetual user of Linux and Unix, I think F# is really very cool.

I am one of the happy few who has had paying work with F# when I worked at Jet and Walmart. I came in with primarily a Haskell background, and so I was expecting to hate it because I hate most things that Microsoft has attached its name to, but I ended up really liking it.

Just a note, while its syntax is similar to OCaml, its semantics are a bit different. You don't have the cool OCaml functors in the same way, but you do have Haskell-style "do" notation with monads, which is nice.

I haven't used OCaml in awhile so I can't go into a lot of detail on the differences between them, but the only things I really missed from Haskell are monad transformers and software transactional memory.

I definitely think it's worth playing with for an afternoon.