Title: Was F# viewed by MSFT as a cheap way to capture more developer mindshare, by accident, harvesting efforts by the research group? Or did they deliberately try to fill a niche they identified beforehand from marketing feedback?<p>F# is cool, but C# 4.0 does not seem to lack much, feature-wise. If anything the MSFT ecosystem seems to lack supporting tools, not language features. 
Why another language from scratch? Why not more effort porting an existing language to the CLR?<p>Also, IronPython and F# projects seem to demonstrate that it takes a long time to make a credible language for CLR/Visual Studio. A grammar for your language, a compiler, ok. How long did it take? But then you realize oh no, VS support will take many man-years. Whoops.
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