Since I’m a language and developer tools geek (I do this stuff for a living!), I like to think about where developer tools and languages will be in the future. This post is one of those kinds of future-thinking posts.
The current developer tooling landscape can improve a lot Before I dive into a bunch of stuff that I’m excited about for the future, I’d like to acknowledge that modern developer tooling as most people know it has a lot of room for improvement:
The COVID-19 pandemic forced me, like so many other office workers, into a remote work situation. The messaging was that this was temporary:
Prepare for 3 or so weeks at home No office equipment budget, since we’ll all be back Try to keep cool and calm, this will be over soon But as those few weeks went by, it became clear that this was going to be more of a forced year of remote work, not just a few weeks.
The F# language is kind of wierd (in a good way). Born out of Microsoft Research and initially sold to the world by Microsoft as a part of Visual Studio, it now has a vibrant open source community and ecosystem around it. This puts it in a funny place. A great way to illustrate that is to visit the following links:
F# homepage on the Microsoft .NET site Homepage for F# and the F# Software Foundation The first link a page on the Microsoft marketing site for .
I love using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) as my main editor whenever I can, and because I’m an F# developer, I get to use the amazing Ionide plugin .
But to get specific, the main thing I use F# and VSCode for is F# scripting. F# scripts are the best tool for doing ad-hoc computing work, such as:
Trying out a library Writing a utility to process some stuff, like transforming markdown files Testing out someone’s code when they’re asking for help in the F# Slack , F# Forums , or pretty much anywhere Etc.
Note: this post does not apply to Jetbrains Rider. Rider uses its own engine for representing F# syntax expressions and has its own strongly-typed API for traversing and manipulating F# expressions.
F# tooling in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code supports a variety quick fixes for fixing an error in your code. Here’s an example of one:
Wrap Expression in Parentheses Quick Fix Pretty neat, right? This post will walk through the essentials of implementing a quick fix like this in either Visual Studio or VSCode.