Hipster Programming: Coding in F# on Mac OS X

The vitriol towards Microsoft has a long and graceless tradition with a lexicon sporting such inventive neologisms as the venerable "M$FT" and the puerile "Total Failure System" in reference to Team Foundation Server (TFS). Oh, how these countless little slights must wound the souls of those folks toiling away under the yoke of stodgy corporate masters! Their inner light having been dimmed and filtered by a soulless, crushing capitalism so much so that they unconsciously embrace their sameness, adopting a uniform of pique polo shirts and khaki pants.

The iconoclasts, the individualists, the thinkers--these bear the nome d'guerre "Rubyist", "Rails aficionado", "Python hacker", "open source developer". You will know them not by their similarity but their diversity, their vestiture definitively anti-establishment and their mocking of any tool that you don't have to download from github and compile from source.

As in all things, there is a middle road whose pedestrians are accused of compromise with the Devil by one side and "just trying to be different" on the other. Yet in this camp we find many sagacious, experienced craftspeople who have spent time in both camps. With the reader's indulgence, I shall call them hipster programmers.

For what its worth, I consider myself a hipster programmer, as evinced by how I spent my morning. Having been developing in .NET for nearly a decade and of recent years drawn strongly to functional programming, I am of course learning F#. But, I'm also experimenting with Erlang, Ruby, and more recently Clojure. As far as platforms go, you've got a lot of choice these days: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. With Windows you certainly need Cygwin and a git port. Linux is probably the easiest to get going on but lacks some of the day-to-day niceties (e.g. iTunes). Mac OS X can't be (legally) virtualized, so it makes an obvious choice as the base system.

My work machine is a MacBook Pro running VMWare Fusion. My recent explorations of Clojure have kept my exclusive in the Java tools domain--Maven, Ant, Netbeans, etc., but the Chicago Clojure user group recently invited Dr. David Miller to come talk about clojure-clr, a C# implementation of Clojure for the CLR, very hipster! What could be cooler than that?

Well, porting clojure-clr to F# of course!

Sure, I could fire up Fusion and VS 2010 and start rocking, but I like to begin with the end in mind, namely moving seamlessly between writing code in Clojure targetting the CLR and the JVM. I'd like to use similar tool chains. And, I'd like to present to a group of the cool kids in their native tongue.

The first step is getting an environment setup. Robert Pickering has a great article to get Mono setup on Mac OS X. Don't skip the 'sudo install-mono.sh' step. At the time of this writing their is a strange error in his instructions regarding the mono.snk file. The install-mono.sh file makes this pretty clear, so just ignore that part. Basically, you have to give the F# assemblies a proper strong name to add it to the GAC.

Now, I love vim--it was my first code editor--but the Ruby kids have been using TextMate, so let's use that since someone kindly shared an F# bundle. That bundle uses iTerm to evaluate function in F# interactive, so we'll need that too. Finally, we need to alias "fsi" to run F# interactive using Mono, so the TextMate bundle will run it properly. Edit ~/.profile adding this command.

alias fsi='mono ~/path/to/fsi.exe'

So we've got the beginnings of a build environment going; what's next?

• Get a branch going on github, referencing the clojure-clr project


• Get a build system stack setup (Maven? Rake?)


• Find an unit testing suite for F#/Mono/Mac OS X


• Start hacking