Well, you should understand that at the end the bot had to be pretty complex to be competitive. Fast prototyping wasn't so important, as most of the theory was

Well, you should understand that at the end the bot had to be pretty complex to be competitive. Fast prototyping wasn't so important, as most of the theory was already there. But only a few managed to get them working together. In this case a prototyping language didn't have an advantage (like with most project with >4k lines, it's hard to oversee). And secondly, most bots relied on minimax, which is a brute force algorithm. Performance was a big difference. For example, a friend of mine ported my code from C# to C++ (from compiled language to other compiled language) and got in the top 50 (I finished 81st), this without any changes to the algorithm.