boo

There is a lot to read in their wiki, https://github.com/boo-lang/boo/wiki >Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language. Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone. For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to do

Two things about Boo that have left a lasting mark: First, it was the first time I'd seen quasi-quotes, where you can write code that them so converted to AST. Very very lovely dynamic programming. It was so awesome having a static runtime but being able to do multi-phase programming in it, was so much nicer than anything I'd seen in java. Excellent easy to understand macro writing. Second, the boo test cases rocked. Test cases start with a string which is the expected output. Then the rest of the testcase is a short bit of code that outputs. It was so easy to debug & see what was happening, such an elegant frameworkless way to run tests. I used it a couple times commercially at small webdev shops, but had a bunch of personal projects using Boo. Lead author Bamboo got hired by Unity and their (I believe now deprecated?) UnityScript was re

An age ago I used to be a huge fan of the Boo programming language, a .NET runtime language that was vaguely python-ic (Unity hired the author & made UnityScript with this work). One of the great features I loved was Boo's metaprogramming capabilities. Among others, like E, the quasi-parser was easy to reach for & use at runtime. The tests are a good way to see Boo features, here's a quasi-quote test, which uses a Quasi-quote to get some code, then adds to that AST imperatively: https://github.com/boo-lang/boo/blob/master/tests/testcases/... At the time, having the compiler & AST all defined in .NET, managed, was incredibly cool & exciting. Now .NET does that pretty pervasively, but at the time, being able to build & compile & load code at runtime was sweet. I wrote something using a mode Clang used to have where Clang could print out som

Boo lang. httpshttps://github.com/boo-lang/boo/blob/master/docs/BooManifest...