[dbrigg]

If that were true, why is their primary commitment to "encourage the community" and "build a forum" (my paraphrasing)? It triggers my doublespeak detector. If they were developing the language they'd have put "language development" at the top of the list.

Call me skeptical. Microsoft are no stranger to killing off their products.

[WorldMaker]

Because F# was Microsoft's first open source language to even allow community involvement in its design processes and accept PRs directly from the community (C#, VB, and Typescript have all subsequently followed in F#'s trailblazed path here), there is a strong sense of not wanting to dictate the language direction and instead build the language as a community effort. It's been such a point of pride in the F# community that so much of F#'s development has been out in the open and a community effort, that are good reasons Microsoft would want to make sure its language was inclusive of that and respectful to that history.

[hacker_9]

Because that is what they have been doing with C# and VB for the last couple of years? The compilers are open source and anyone can write a language feature request on GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn