F#: el lenguaje funcional de Microsoft

What are the goals of F#?

One way of looking at it is that the purpose of F# is to solve all of the 7 major problems described in Wadler's classic paper Why no one uses functional languages: Libraries, Portability, Availability, Packagability, Tools, Training and Popularity. Of these, F# solves the issues of libraries (by immediately giving high-quality, no-wrapper access to hundreds of .NET libraries), portability (the .NET bytecode is portable, e.g. the Mono project provides an implementation for many platforms), packagability (.NET assemblies are an excellent packaging mechanism) and tools (.NET tools for other languages nearly always work with F# as well). The remaining issues are partly solved by the fact that F# has a core design similar to that of OCaml, a popular functional language implementation for which a good amount of training material is available, and also that huge amounts of excellent training material for the .NET platform is available on the web.