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I'm pretty sure the biggest player using Haskell is Microsoft, which develops and maintains Haskell in the first place...



I don't think that's accurate. Microsoft has a role in the development and maintenance of Haskell because they currently employ Simon P. Jones, one of the big driving forces behind Haskell, as a researcher.

However, new versions of Haskell (the language) are created by temporary committees (which are not composed by Microsoft).

GHC (the main implementation) is an open source project with developers from different organizations. According to this page (https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TeamGHC), SPJ is the only one employed by Microsoft. He is one of the core contributors and he owns a large part of the code base, but not to such an extent that GHC can be called a Microsoft project even if Microsoft would want that. Haskell is not a MS product, it has been under development since well before SPJ was employed by MS.

Finally, I'm not aware of MS funding the project beyond paying SPJ's wage.


I though MS was pushing towards F#. Is there any indication they plan to focus more on one or the other?


They're not focusing on Haskell commercially, but in Microsoft Research where they employ some of the main Haskell devs. A lot of their research has gone into F#, C# and .NET libraries (like LINQ).




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