Boo at MichiPug

I presented Boo at Michipug last night. That is the Michigan Python Users Group. Boo was interesting to present there because, well, boo is not python. Yes, boo has some language features similar to python, but for a python programmer I think boo is different enough that there is still a steep learning curve. Plus the absence of all of the python standard library in favor of the .NET libraries makes for an very different programming experience.

I don’t know boo deep enough to be able to focus on its extensibility, and I don’t think that those features would be well received by a group of pythonistas. I focused on the basics and instead we talked about python and .net differences and what they meant when you are writing boo.

Assuming the date and time are translated from Israel to EDT, then right around the time I was finishing my boo presentation, Oren wrote a blog post on boo.

… I keep getting more and more and more amazed by the power that Boo is giving me.

In order to fix some of those bugs, I had to literally change the meaning of the if statement. (I defined my own nullable propagator, which I had to implement deeply into the language).

Damn, I love this language.

Oh, and FYI, if 2+2 == 4 will not do the expected thing anymore 🙂 

I’m not there yet with boo, but I will be… I will be.

 

I did enjoy pointing out IQuackFu and how easy it is to have method missing. I have a deep love hate relationship with method missing. On one hand, if you are relying on method missing, then you are probably doing something wrong. On the other hand, it sure is nice to have it if you need it. Who needs IronRuby or IronPython? I’d much rather write boo. That said I think those Iron projects are really sweet and I hope they succeed greatly. I long for the day that I can run a TurboGears app on IIS/ASP.NET or Apache/Mono.