What if F# is somebody's pet project? Microsoft might have invested in F# because the supporters inside Microsoft had the political capital to make it happen and not because there was a real product strategy.

Some things about F# are consistent with the pet project theory:

- The language was developed by a team in Microsoft Research, not by a product team. If a product team thought there was a good product strategy for the language, they would have taken it over.

- Some of the reasons given for F# are not a direct customer benefit. Example: show that CLR can support languages other than C#.

- Given the question here on HN, it's not obvious to some people why Microsoft invested so much in the language.

I raising the question about why Microsoft invested in and released the language and not making a statement about the quality of the language itself.