F# and Enterprise Software

Question

Being a C# developer since version 1.0, F# has captured my free time for the past few weeks. Computers are now sold with 2, 4 .. Cores and multi-threading is not always simple to accomplish.

At the moment I see that F# has great potential for complicated and or heavy workloads. Do you think that F# will (once RTM) become an important player in the Enterprise Software market?

Answer 1

I think F# has great opportunity to make inroads some of the niche areas of enterprise applications such as mathematical modelling (e.g. for banking/trading applications). Removing side effects from functions also leads to great opportunities for parallelism and memoization. Its hard to say if these languages will ever take off for mainstream development is hard to say, but in my opinion the problems are more likely to be human oriented (i.e. lack of skills and high learning curve for people familiar with more typical languages like c#/java/c++) rather than technical.