[jetti]

I disagree with your premise on why F# was adopted. It isn't because it does objects but it was really the first functional language that was pushed by Microsoft and ran on the .NET platform. Had F# not run on the CLR I don't think it would have nearly as many users as it does now.

[WorldMaker]

That goes into why Microsoft (Research) chose to base F# on OCaml rather than SML (or Haskell, which Microsoft Research also has some fingers in that pie): it's not that useful targeting the CLR if you can't interact with other things running on the CLR (including the Base Class Library [BCL]). Presumably Microsoft could have have tried for something wild like trying to build a "CLR Object monad" for Haskell, but the F# team instead went with the existing, known commodity language family that already straddled that border between object systems and functional programming (OCaml).