Ok, F# may not be exactly new as it's been in the "Skunk works" at Microsoft for a while and Don Syme (Microsoft Research) has been blogging about it for some months now (see Don's blog here).  The big news is  Soma (S. Somasegar) who is the Corporate VP for the Microsoft Developer Division has just announced that he is forming a new team to take F# forward (hopefully, we will see it in Visual Studio in a future release beside VB.NET, C#, and C++).

Read Soma's announcement here.

Here's a "backgrounder" on F# from the Microsoft Research site (click here to see the full post)

F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. F# gives you a combination of

• interactive scripting like Python,
• the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment like MATLAB,
• the strong type inference and safety of ML,
• a cross-compiling compatible core shared with the popular OCaml language,
• a performance profile like that of C#,
• easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools,
• a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme,
• the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration,
• the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations,
• the speed of native code execution on the concurrent, portable, and distributed .NET Framework.

The only language to provide a combination like this is F# (pronounced FSharp) - a scripted/functional/imperative/object-oriented programming language that is a fantastic basis for many practical scientific, engineering and web-based programming tasks. 

F# is a pragmatically-oriented variant of ML that shares a core language with OCaml. F# programs run on top of the .NET Framework. Unlike other scripting languages it executes at or near the speed of C# and C++, making use of the performance that comes through strong typing. Unlike many statically-typed languages it also supports many dynamic language techniques, such as property discovery and reflection where needed. F# includes extensions for working across languages and for object-oriented programming, and it works seamlessly with other .NET programming languages and tools.

~ Robert Shelton

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