After reading more about F#, and some of the stuff coming up in C# 4.0 / VS2010, it's going to be tempting for me to seriously think about going back to MSFT stuff for my work at home. Microsoft has been reactive in the right way over the past 5 years with regards to .net.
I'm coding my startup in F# and I love it -- I don't ever want to go back to C# or any of the other .NET languages.
The cool part isn't just the FP, the cool part is how you can suck in all the other libraries written in .NET and use them easily.
If mono supported tail-recursion optimization I'd go there in a heartbeat, but I'm very, very happy with F# and a stripped-down MS stack. Plus as long as I don't start writing aspx pages (and I'm not!) and keep my separation of concerns, I can easily move to a *nix environment at some later date.
I'd encourage you to check out F# some more. I had a hard time coming from an imperative background, but eventually it started clicking.
.Net started really changing for me with the introduction of the DLR. I maintain an application with a pretty large codebase (around 1.1 or 1.2 million LOC, it's been a year or so since I've really looked) and I wanted to change out the scripting engine we used. It used to be this VBA monstrosity, but it was ridiculously easy to change over to using Python via IronPython. It took 2 lines of code, plus another 15 or 20 lines to specify what I wanted to expose to the scripting engine. It was incredible!
I don't mind aspx all that much, but I see what you're saying about keeping things separated. I've never been fond of IIS and I don't see that opinion changing in the immediate future. mod_mono seems interesting, but I haven't really looked at it at all.
To me, the biggest win about the .net stack is the tooling; I know people like to bag on it, but the .net debugger in Visual Studio is seriously great. We maintain that huge application I was talking about with 2 developers and it's really no problem because it's very easy for us to track down bugs when they crop up - we spend 80% or more of our time on new development.
I'm still on a Clojure kick, so I'm avoiding F# for the time being just so I can maintain some sanity, but it's next on my language list for sure.
As an aside, weren't you going to be doing semi-regular posts to HN about your startup? I think you're overdue ;)
I was going to do an HN update around the 15th, but I decided to implement a Bayesian learning system in my app and had to tear the entire thing apart and rebuild it so I lost a week or so.
I agree. Just last night I actually said to myself that I'm going to install Visual Studio 2010 express when it comes out, just for F#. I usually do all my development on Linux, so there you go.
