Meh, F# is pretty good, but Scala has a better type-system. You cannot model type-classes in F# for example and there's some ugliness in it, in a true Ocaml fashion - for example I don't like how you've got to deal with 2 types of generics or the prevalence of "static" methods, static methods that are complete hacks that go back to C++ at least (Scala has no such thing as static methods btw). In many ways Scala is a very elegant language, too bad that many people are scared by these myths that are flying around.

That said, people are missing the forest from the trees. This isn't about the language, but rather about the runtime and the standard library. That's the true value of the JVM, that's the true value in .NET.

There wouldn't be any problem for porting Scala to .NET. Sure, it would be difficult as .NET's reified generics are maybe too limited for Scala's type-system, but I'm sure somebody could make it work, at least partially.

And there was a Scala for .NET, but it lacked interest so it died. But hey, you can still run stuff built in Scala on top of .NET by means of IKVM ;-) Has poor performance compared to a JVM, but then again, people are willing to build stuff in Scala for Android. Also Clojure.NET is doing pretty good from what I've heard.

As a Scala developer that loves Scala and the JVM, I personally find this announcement very exciting. As finally, the JVM has true competition ;-)

F# is elegant but ultimately held back by its lack of higher kinded types.

F# is not really like Scala in the sense that it's more "extreme" in terms of FP, you can't easy fallback on more classical patterns if FP doesn't work well for your problem.