Having the REPL (F# Interactive) available always from inside Visual Studio is one of the biggest changes to my workflow, ever. It saves so much time, allows me to play with things, and on occasion, I've even used it for live debugging where a debugger wasn't possible (paste parts of the source into the REPL on production box, then interactively play with it).
With C#, it was common to always have some project somewhere that was just a playground to run a few lines of code to test out a library, make sure I got a format string correct, etc. The F# REPL in VS eliminates that. If the F# team had more resources, and could make it fully integrated, it'd be unbelievable.
F# doesn't have an interpreter, it's compiled. The REPL is taking your lines and compiling modules and whatnot on the fly, then loading and running them pretty much as normal. So when you build, you get a binary, and you're all set - no runtime overhead.
Meanwhile, C# is supposed to have a REPL, Mono has an implementation, but it seems like C# is sort of abandoned and now the primary folks are working on yet another "almost-JavaScript-to-JavaScript" compiler.
With C#, it was common to always have some project somewhere that was just a playground to run a few lines of code to test out a library, make sure I got a format string correct, etc. The F# REPL in VS eliminates that. If the F# team had more resources, and could make it fully integrated, it'd be unbelievable.
F# doesn't have an interpreter, it's compiled. The REPL is taking your lines and compiling modules and whatnot on the fly, then loading and running them pretty much as normal. So when you build, you get a binary, and you're all set - no runtime overhead.
Meanwhile, C# is supposed to have a REPL, Mono has an implementation, but it seems like C# is sort of abandoned and now the primary folks are working on yet another "almost-JavaScript-to-JavaScript" compiler.