I can see that functional programming can be a plus in a production environment if it's very easy to use by non functional code. MS could see that too when they came up with F# I guess.
Since they both compile to IL, you can handle problems that ask for a functional approach functional and use those solutions very easily in your procedural code.
In that way functional code can easily find its way in a production environment a bit at a time
Therefore, and since the userbase of MS is that big, my guess is that if F# will not catch on in the very near future, that Haskell won't either.
