Writing a StarCraft Bot in F#

Yes, you get the Intellisense, debugging, analysis tools, etc from Visual Studio (which are quite nice). More importantly, you get the ability to use any existing .net assembly, including .net itself (kind of like some of the JVM-based functional languages get access to Java).

It has been very good so far. The visual studio support is excellent. You get code highlighting (of course), intellisense, you don't have to worry about building and compiling (just hit run), debugging, compilation is fast, execution is fast, there is an interactive repl. And last but not least: you get access to the whole suite of .NET libraries: http, gui libraries, parsers for various formats, access to databases, etc.

The most important annoyance is that you often need to explicitly upcast objects. For example if you have a String and a function that takes Object you need to upcast the String to Object.

I've been using emacs, so the tooling is equally compelling. ;)

The nicest surprises so far have been:

- I can code in a fully dynamically typed manner for the parts of my code where it's more convenient. (To do this in O'Caml requires manual wrappers and/or some camlp4 magic.)

- A nice set of sequence comprehensions and syntax for it, built-in.

The big downside is that there's no attempt whatsoever to unify the .NET-centric OO language model and the O'Caml functional language model: You're stuck alternating between writing code in C#-with-some-type-inference or in O'Caml.

(If you want that unified model: Look at scala.)

As he's now working for Google (http://achrissmith.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-month-in.html) I wonder if he's still involved with F# (Google employees not being able to use Windows and all).

update: To answer my own question, I asked him, and he responded: http://twitter.com/aChrisSmith/status/21929022794

I love the internet.