It's interesting how the F# team is pushing F# to be the language for data-rich programming. Their Type Provider concept looks promising, but some of their demos still are comically difficult coming from a R/Matlab/Python style of data-rich programming. Of course coming from C#/Java it all looks amazing.

But I don't quite see how F# replaces R or Matlab, even with library support. Performance alone seems dubious value proposition, since packages like Jacket for Matlab make most computations extremely fast.

Anybody have experience where demand for strongly typed language is really needed for data analysis tasks?