Given that Google hired Guido Van Rossum and that python is one of the three (and up until very recently two) supported languages for GAE, I think we can safely assume the Google isn't entirely anti python.
> I think we can safely assume the Google isn't entirely anti python.
I don't suggest otherwise. It's known that Python is one of Google's three languages approved for internal use (or apparently four now that JS has got a foothold). But I'm sure I've seen reports that people are nonetheless being pushed towards Google's other two officially blessed languages, at least on production code - and in fairness, Google is a place where developer time is often cheaper than the machine time you have to spend to save developer time. But moveover it seems that, even when people in Google do want to fix their Python performance issues by making Python perform better rather than by reducing its use, they tend to want to do it in-house rather than by adopting or supporting other people's work: look at Unladen Swallow. That would be in line with the rather hubristic, command-economy approach - "let's hire all the world's smartest people, then order them to build the future" - that seems to determine Google's actions in general. Hiring GvR fits that pattern too (as well as making plenty of sense).
But I'm sure other people here are much better informed about this than I am.
The problem is python never took off as a scripting language. In spirit it was a great language to develop applications in.
This creates a dilemma for a lot of people while choosing a technology. If you have to choose a language where you don't want to develop stuff quickly. Then you now have sufficient time to choose a static language and then develop stuff at the speed desired.
For other quick stuff there is Perl anyway.And it doesn't make sense to use Python, which is slow(compared to java), which doesn't give quick development cycle(compared to perl).
If you wish to relevant for a long time, then you have to do at least one thing properly.
Well IIRC, he's employed by Microsoft Research, which is not really the same as Microsoft proper. And they have used some concepts that are core to Haskell, such as LINQ being a monad, and F# is definitely related (though I don't know if that's an official Microsoft language).
I think F# is largely based on OCaml. I'm not sure what'd make a language official; MS does the development work on it, so I guess that'd be a yes on officialdom?
To be more precise, F# is based on the non-OO parts of Caml, with a completely different object system so it would be be compatible with .Net objects from other languages such as C#.
IIRC, the original research was going to be into making Haskell for .Net, but there were enough issues (in particular, being purely functional makes interop with C# and the existing .Net libraries radically more difficult) that ML seemed like a better fit.
