It's generally regarded the C++ of the functional world: fast, practical, somewhat ugly. A lot less bloated, of course. It also boasts the OO paradigm (hence, the name) and direct imperative constructs where you see fit (rather than Haskell's insistence on purity via monads)...
and
OCaml is, above all a practical and pragmatic language. Companies like Jane St Capital (see the article in issue 7 of "The Monad Reader") and XenSource among others are using Ocaml for real world problems.
OCaml encourages you to write pure static single assignment functional code. However, when that is not enough, you can drop back to imperative coding and uses references (ie mutable variables). It even offers OO for situation when OO is needed ..
F# has certainly been been regarded as one of the better modern functional programming languages. Jon Harrop, of OCaml fame, has high regards for it, and he has been working on "porting" his OCaml book in F# ..
As a functional programming language, F# is among the best. It provides modern features like an expressive static type system, pattern matching and OOP as well as being practical. The F# language is also being pushing into the mainstream by Microsoft, who recently announced its productization.
I think the biggest plus in favor of F# is the committment of Microsoft to push it as a mainstream functional language on the .NET platform. Integrating F# as a fully supported language in Visual Studio will definitely add to the momentum in the language being used in mainstream enterprise applications.
Is the functional programming paradigm looking stronger than ever in being pushed to the mainstream development horizon ?
