LINQ is _the_ only reason I tolerate .net
Linq makes C# much better, especially compared to java. It's a whole different story in F# though.
I'm a Haskell enthusiast, but it's not so good at Windows support, or libraries. I've been thinking F# might be just the ticket.
If you know Haskell then it's pretty easy to get into F#. The only thing you'll miss are higher-kinded types. Although they can be hacked in[3], it's not really worth the effort a lot of the time
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/hh225374.aspx
I'm still trying to get my head around it; I thought I'd try to do so by implementing the core types and functions in Haskell's Pipes. So far I've managed to convince the F# compiler to take well over an hour to compile 70 lines of code!
The main argument against them has been lack of CLR support. But it seems that there's already the FsControl way, so I think some syntactic sugar would go a long way.
So yeah, until there's language support for type-classes I think it's probably not worth it.
I'll have to go study FsControl now ;)
Type providers http://fsharp.github.io/FSharp.Data/library/JsonProvider.htm... Code quotations http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233212.aspx
Most importantly it has become a first class citizen of the ecosystem so the tooling is already great compared to a lot of similar languages.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/11/12/announ...