Any serious/semi-serious work in Chess Engines?

Hi folks.  I just wanted to see if anybody here has done any serious or semi-serious work in developing chess engines.

I am well up on the theory -- alpha-beta search algorithms and position evaluators and related stuff -- but I am not sure what tools are out there to help with this process.  Aside from using pre-existing code like the gnu chess engine (which is written in C, which I find to be an annoying language to work with), I thought it would be good to use publicly available board rendering from .pgn files and the like.

I am curious about writing an amateurish chess-playing engine.  Anybody with recommendations?

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/yet-another-on-line-chess-program

Here's a thread about a chess program with ai. He is updating it regularly and posting in this thread when he (or she) does so.

bill you are no searching deep enough,there is forum that are very serius about programing,but no sure if chess group have this here