[WorldMaker]

Microsoft has always been a polyglot company. They also invested heavily in R and I believe even contributed some things to Julia.

I don't think the pivot entirely failed, there's definitely a small niche for "data science, but it needs to run in .NET" and F# still to my understanding fills it well. It's a very small niche and I don't expect to hear a lot of data scientists directly training for it, but there's a lot of advantages in places that use the Azure stack, for instance, for faster/better/more integrated data science when done with F#.

F# would probably need a lot more investment in dynamic types to truly attract a lot of data scientist attention. (Though the .NET DLR still exists and could use some fresh, modern love.)

Relatedly, I appreciate a lot that Microsoft's polyglot approach helped standardize the ONNX runtime, and even if the data scientists I'm working with prefer Python or R, I can still take ONNX models they build and run them in a C# or F# library with very little sweat.

[progmetaldev]

I think if Microsoft would have continued to invest in projects such as IronRuby and IronPython, we'd be much further along in integrating different paradigms in a way that feels more natural, while also continuing to grow the DLR (for both features and performance).