This is a long story but I will try to summarize it as best I can. We are a .NET shop that writes software for a variety of different types of funds. For example, we write health claims management software, pension management software, 401(k) software and some other financial-type things.Now we are entering a new realm: derivatives and quantitative analytics type of work, which seems very exciting. This is something that is coming down in the next 8-12 months I've been told.Now, I have learned some functional programming on my own, mainly just superficial glances at various languages via this book but never really dug deep into it. Now, since we are a .NET shop I was thinking F# might be a good choice, because we could potentially leverage some .NET libraries and existing knowledge possibly.My question is, where to start? I am having an exceedingly difficult time trying to figure out if I should go with Haskell, Erlang, Scala, F#, etc. They all seem very interesting and capable and quite frankly this might be a good chance to break out being so Microsoft dependent.Has anyone had a similar situation? If so, what was your experience making the jump to functional and what did you choose and why? I know this is kind of a big question but I don't know any developers that are using functional methods right now so I have nowhere else to turn other than Googling incessantly and finding flame wars everywhere on the best functional language.
Introducing functional programming into your development environment
.net;functional programming;haskell;erlang
Prototype, prototype, prototype!  Take one bit of business functionality that you think requires functional programming and try the various languages out and see if they really do give you the benefits and the interoperability that you're looking for.