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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

I am excited by this. The article doesn't mention it, but VS 2010 is a game-changer. ML goes mainstream. Let rock_mode=on in...

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In what ways is it a "game changer"? Maybe I'm missing something - it has a few new things but I don't see anything game changing.

I think the implication is that any languages built into Visual Studio get an automatic stamp of approval from corporate management, which is why we get millions of lines of code written in C# and VB.net and not, say, Boo or IronPython. Thus, F# will have something previous ML dialects do not: mainstream credibility.

Of course, one could make the same argument for J# -- which shipped in Visual Studio but is now being discontinued for lack of popularity.

Exactly. Credibility + access to all the .NET libraries. The question now is, why not use it? Esp. if you're already using LINQ.

historical debugger

ML goes mainstream

You're referring to official support for F#, a functional language derived from ML?

Are we going to see "Oslo" their new modeling language in VS2010?

Scala is funnier and is readily available.

If IBM or Oracle announced their official commitment to Scala, that would be a comparable scenario. It's not just F#, which has been available for a while now. It's that it's now a first-class citizen in all respects.

Is it you who are writing the program or "IBM or Oracle"?

The technology I can use for real work is to a certain extent dictated by what is acceptable to the organization. Backing from a major vendor goes a long way towards assuring that.

Was Perl backed by a major vendor? MySQL? FreeBSD?

If it's already backed by a major version, you're already late. So slow.

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