When I look at an announcement like the one I saw today at the Register for Microsoft’s new programming language, it makes me realize just how long I’ve been writing and coding for the web.

Launching a new language is easy – getting it used is hard. The combination of existing code and existing skills is a strong barrier to adoption, and even excellent languages like Ruby and Python have struggled to break out of their niches. What hope is there for F#, the new language that Microsoft has sneaked into Visual Studio 2010, launched this month?

Speaking to Syme, Microsoft’s main motive for including F# in Visual Studio becomes clear. Functional programming is popular in the financial community, where it is used for quantitative analysis. Finance is an important market.

"We find F# is very attractive to financial analysts and quantitative experts," says Syme, the reason being that it excels in data, parallel and algorithmic programming. "F# is attractive in places where the object oriented paradigm isn’t a good fit for the kind of work that’s being done," he says.

If F# is mainly intended for a specific programming niche, that would explain why Microsoft is not putting much energy behind promoting it.

The language announcement certainly sounds exciting, but I’ve done so little platform and native app development in the last four or five years, I’ve lost a bit of perspective.

I do feel, though, that this sort of thing should be paid more attention to. I’ve always felt that it’s such a waste that we continue to bloat our operating systems and applications to the point where we can’t even save 1/100th of the program to an old floppy disk (remember those?), yet they all seem to run at roughly the same speed my 386/33mhz used to run.

If this is a language that can properly utilize parallel programming and multi-core systems, so much the better.