I can confidently answer "yes" to this question, because Tachyus, the first Silicon Valley start-up in the oil and gas industry, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/tachyus-a-data-start-... , chose F# as the core software language. How did this work out? We went from absolutely no software written to deployed as the core operational software of a regional oil production company in 12 weeks. Our management and our customer's management are so happy with the results we are "all in" and not looking back.
> IDE support even in Visual Studio 2013 is absolutely poor
It suits my needs well. References for functions/values/types would be a big nice to have, but I don't miss it that much. Refactoring? Rename refactoring is in the F# community Power Tools http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/136b942e-9f2c-... I've never missed it enough to bother. As for the show-stopping bug in the Power Tools formatter, I would not want software someone else wrote re-arranging the white space in my file. Beyond that refactoring support is rather ill-defined. Making a mish-mash of functional and imperative code more functional/compositional/readable requires thought.
> Options are great; nulls are bad
Many functions in the .NET Framework now support a try version which interface very well with F#, thank you. Other than that F# cannot perform the miracle of making external software null safe.
> F# was completely missed from Roslyn
I respect the OP, but I couldn't care less. (See my next comment.) Roslyn in many ways is just playing catch up with F#, anyway.
> There’s little info on what’s coming in the next version of F#
As a language, F# is pretty feature mature. (The big thing I would like to see is dependent types.) The action going forward is with the open source community, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fsharp-opensource/1C..., which Microsoft fully supports, as it should be with a fully open source language. I know people in the community who already have compiler enhancements, for instance, that should come around in the foreseeable future.
> Hiring developers is already very hard
Fortunately for Tachyus, we have a compelling technology company story and a growing team that makes the F# people (and not just F# people) we want to recruit also want to join us, going so far as to relocate across the country.
This of course does not work for the IT Department of Acme Industries in Flyover, Kansas. The HR department will hate you, but the best alternative is probably to build a core of F#'ers internally. You will have to be creative about your recruiting after that. You need to demonstrate your organization offers a career rather than just a job.
