[small update... I added the links to Nemerle and Boo].
No, I'm not dreaming of Halloween. I have been fooling with SharpDevelop and discovered that there are bindings for Nemerle and Boo. Since I hadn't played with either (but have heard about both via Miguel de Icaza's Blog -- the lead on Mono).
Languages have always been an interest of mine. So this weekend I decided to forego my 7th attempt at VC++ and I read through the Boo tutorial and I have to say at this that I can see a lot of reasons to use it. Boo is very similar to Python. There are no block characters (like "{" or "}"); you define blocks using your indentation (something that scares me a bit). Types can be inferred. If I say:
i = 1
the compiler determines that the variable i is an integer. It can also be a little more dynamic letting you switch the type of a variable. To me this is the best of all worlds. Instead of a generic type like object that holds all types which makes for slow code; the boo compiler is able to switch out the type meaning that your variables can contain any type, but they are specifically of one type. I'm not saying that this is perfect for everything, but for those quick and dirty sessions of coding up a quick prototype this might just be perfect (digging way back in the codebetter archives... check out this post by Darrell on "Why you should learn Python"
It also has some cool list/ienumerator processing features. Your functions come prebuilt with synchronous and asynchronous (background threaded) methods. It has a cool way to replace
if(not SomeCondition) {
i=1
}
via "Modifiers"
i = 1 unless SomeCondition
I could probably go on and on. I need to play a little more...
