| A few counterpoints in favor of F#: - Even if your project doesn't need .NET integration, it's nice to have all of the .NET libraries (built-in or otherwise) at your disposal. OCaml also has some nice libraries, but nowhere near what .NET (or Java, for Scala) has -- so it's likely you'll have to implement your own library for some task if it's outside of the mainstream. - F# has also gained some interesting features since it's branched away from OCaml -- computation expressions (syntactic sugar for monads) and type providers (automatically-generated, strongly-typed interfaces to databases, JSON APIs, etc.), for example. - .NET has a mature and very fast garbage collector tuned for real world usage (e.g., people running C#/ASP.NET on large webservers). This hugely benefits F#'s performance. - You can use Visual Studio or MonoDevelop to write and debug F# apps, which makes it much nicer to use in practice. (Oh, and you can get Visual Studio Express for Web if you want to use VS and F# for free.) I don't have anything against OCaml, I just wanted to point out that F# certainly deserves consideration if you want to learn a new language (i.e., it's not a knock-off version of OCaml). |