Your comment just tries to derail the discussion by bringing up Scheme or Lisp in a context where only languages are considered that are widely used in the industry. Otherwise, how could the word "abandon" possibly apply?
This language shootout has been criticized before. Except for optimized C and C++ there is no popular language (I'm talking about the performance that is due to the design of the language, _not_ a particular implementation. For example dynamic typing is necessarily slower.) that is faster than C#. Try unsafe C# and you know what I mean.
Bringing up Scheme here is entirely inappropriate. It's common wisdom that Lisp and Scheme are more beautiful, but this article is about a language that is supposedly "abandoned", because it may not be mainstream enough anymore at some point. If C# is abandoned, then what can you say about Scheme?
As far as node.js is concerned, it's not a strawman: In fact, the people who claim that MS abandoned C# think that they want to replace it by Javascript. MS even supports node.js in Azure.
"concurrency" is not the same as asynchronicity, which is what I was talking about. And promises are not even close what C# 5.0 tries to achieve. In fact, promises have been present since .NET 4.0.
Finally, please explain how Scala is "intellectually challenging". This is not my experience.
(throwaway account due to procrastination setting)