[jdh30]

> The language was developed by a team in Microsoft Research, not by a product team. If a product team thought there was a good product strategy for the language, they would have taken it over.

Luke Hoban's F# product team in Redmond develop F# with the research team in Cambridge UK continuing to evolve it.

> Some of the reasons given for F# are not a direct customer benefit. Example: show that CLR can support languages other than C#.

F# was not the second language after C# to run on the CLR.

> Given the question here on HN, it's not obvious to some people why Microsoft invested so much in the language.

The investment is tiny for Microsoft and has already paid off by drawing people into the Windows platform who then buy Visual Studio 2010 in order to use F#.