Boo 0.5 released

Submitted by Sylvester Boots 2005-02-17 .NET 39 Comments

Boo is a new object oriented .NET language, heavily inspired by Python’s syntax, that supports static typing for speed and duck typing for dynamic late-binding, python-style coding; there is full type-inference and closure supoprt, also.Boo 0.5 has been released amd you can download here, or check the release notes here. The new release sports many bugfixes and heralds the arrival of the SharpDevelop plugin “BooBinding” (courteousy of Daniel Grunwald) complete with code completion, code outlining, and a C# to Boo code conversion function. Also included is a stable interactive interpreter and a lightweight “Boo Explorer” for people who do not need the advanced functionality of SharpDevelop.

Elsewhere, Nemerle looks good too.

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Eugenia Loli

Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.

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39 Comments

2005-02-18 3:00 am

Anonymous
Is “C” really a great name to begin with? “I’m a _C_ programmer” (compare with “I’m an A student”) 🙂
2005-02-18 3:03 am

Anonymous
Is there one? I might play with it if such a thing exists. Groovy and JRuby require Java and I prefer something that comes with official Debian (like Mono).
2005-02-18 3:14 am

Anonymous
Did I scare you?
2005-02-18 3:19 am

Anonymous
How does this compare to IronPython? What are the advantages of using one over the other?
2005-02-18 3:25 am

Anonymous
Uh, one is still being worked on? The IronPython mailing list is dead and its developer hasn’t been seen for months. ;( Boo had an SVN check-in just this morning, though. =D

Although, I would have to say that after using Boo for awhile that it “integrates” very nicely with .NET. Timespan literals, for instance, use the .NET TimeSpan class, so you can drop’em where-ever a method takes a TimeSpan literal. Boo Lists implement the IList interface, so they can be used anywhere that takes an ICollection or an IList… closures are sweet and functions are apparently first class methods so you can pass’em around as pointers. Some good stuff, but its only my opinion.

I think its very nice compared with IronPython, as bugfixes are accepted regularily.
2005-02-18 3:28 am

Anonymous
Oh, and its a great way to freak people out when they ask what language you’re using.

“Why, I’m using… *screams* BOO!”
2005-02-18 3:53 am

Anonymous
I’m told Ruby has a Ruby-like syntax. 😉
2005-02-18 3:57 am

Anonymous
Just what the world needs – yet another programming language. What does this one have that the other 9,000 don’t?
2005-02-18 4:17 am

Anonymous
The good thing about more programming languages is you can get a job easy.

There are only so many SNOBOL programmers out there -_-
2005-02-18 5:01 am

Anonymous
I heard a rumor that the developer of IronPython now works at Microsoft … is this true?
2005-02-18 5:05 am

Anonymous
Yup, the main developer behind Ironpython (Jim) was hired by MS awhile ago.

*cough* Development stagnated at about the same time…
2005-02-18 5:26 am

Anonymous
Come on…

“I’m a Boo programmer!”

How can you expect something serious with a name like that?

Hell, I’ve been asking the same thing about the ‘Ubuntu’ Linux distro for months. These people must be smoking some serious herb then they come up with names like that.
2005-02-18 6:53 am

Anonymous
Ubuntu means “humanity” in an African language. It’s a big world out there.
2005-02-18 7:48 am

Anonymous
At least getters and setters definition is improved compared to Python where you have to write something like x = property(getter_method, setter_method, …) near end of the class definition.

Of course it’s pity that programming world gets fragmented with all these new languages. Microsoft claims that Linux is too fragmented with all the distributions and choices but it seems that .Net is following Linux in this issue.
2005-02-18 9:00 am

Anonymous
Ubuntu means “humanity” in an African language. It’s a big world out there.

I’m positive ‘Boo!’ means ‘humanity’ in one of the 6K languages out there.
2005-02-18 9:37 am

Anonymous
>Hell, I’ve been asking the same thing about the ‘Ubuntu’ Linux distro for months. These people must be smoking some serious herb then they come up with names like that.

Hehe! He said “herb”!
2005-02-18 9:39 am

Anonymous
Guess who will be one of the keynote speakers at PyCon 2005 ?

http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/keynotes.html
2005-02-18 12:05 pm

Anonymous
Guess who will be one of the keynote speakers at PyCon 2005 ?

2005-02-18 12:48 pm

Anonymous
“Ubuntu means “humanity” in an African language. It’s a big world out there.”

a slight correction –

I’ts a big world out here Darius you should come out sometime.

2005-02-18 1:03 pm

Anonymous
What’s the difference of “duck typing” and late binding? Looks like the same for me, just declare something as “duck” instead of “object”…

2005-02-18 1:35 pm

Anonymous
I love the logo, got to be one of the most clever designs I’ve seen in a while.

Sharpdevelop bindings and a Python inspired syntax makes this a very attractive package.

I’ll give it a try once I’ve finished X rounds of UT2k4.

2005-02-18 1:40 pm

Anonymous
As far as I understand it, you must duck type an object if you want to access any member of it not known at compile time.

2005-02-18 1:45 pm

Anonymous
Late binding means that a variable name’s ‘true’ type is not given in the declaration of that object but by whatever object (or in most cases, reference) you eventually pack into that name; duck typing is a bit different but I don’t see how it could work properly without late binding as functions would have to be bound late as well (this idea is a bit hazy for me, still… but I think this is the case.)

Late binding is kinda “simulated” in static languages by using some supertype (or ultimate parent object) like “Object” in java; In java’s case, something you declare as an object can get virtually anything put into it and work as that type, but the thing’s type is still *bound* as Object when you declare it (since Object itself is a type..); in true late binding you cannot pass an unbound variable.

With duck typing, it does not matter what type an object is at all as long as it implements whatever methods that the receiver is expecting the object to implement. A good example is that in python, if you have some object “Snake”, then the expressions “Snake[1]”, “Snake[1:10]”, or iteration “for coils in Snake:” will all work if the appropriate methods are found in “Snake”.

2005-02-18 2:51 pm

Anonymous
Duck Typing (aka, dynamic typing):

x = 0

x = “HOHO, MERRY CHRISTMAS.” //perfectly valid.

Useful for a mathematical function that might take any number of numeric types that support the “+” operator.

Late Binding:

x = 0 //X is now an integer.

x = “LALALA” //Uh ohs!

2005-02-18 3:23 pm

Anonymous
Maybe Alan Kay was right…First Groovy, now Boo.

2005-02-18 5:53 pm

Anonymous
What in the devil are you talking about?!

2005-02-18 5:58 pm

Anonymous
As far as I can tell, this “duck typing” is the same thing as type annotations, except in reverse. A language with type annotations defaults to dynamic typing, and optionally allows you to statically type certain variables and functions for performance, or to enforce type constraints. Duck typing works in reverse, defaulting to static typing, while reserving a special static type “duck” to allow the programmer to specify that a variable should be treated as dynamically typed.

2005-02-18 6:56 pm

Anonymous
..while reserving a special static type “duck” to allow the programmer to specify that a variable should be treated as dynamically typed.

No it’s simpler than that. It just comes from the expression ‘if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck’. So if two instances can both respond to ‘quack’ and ‘walk’ method calls, you can consider them equivalent, even if they don’t share a common base type/base class. Jonas’s explanation above is correct, although he talks about snakes rather than ducks.

In Objective-C/Cocoa there are ‘protocols’ which are just like Java interfaces, they define a set of methods that that an instance supporting the protocol will respond to. So that’s like declaring a type/java interface that can be checked at compile time.

And ‘informal protocols’ are when you don’t have an explicit interface, but document the methods expected to be supported. If you want an instance to pass for a duck, it must implement ‘walk’ and ‘quack’ methods. That isn’t checked at compile time, but as long as it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck at runtime, that’s fine. They needn’t have any base class in common (apart from NSObject which all instances descend from like Object in java).

2005-02-18 8:30 pm

Anonymous
In January, Serverwatch.com published a review of the upcoming Solaris 10. Here is part of what they said about DTrace :

“Solaris DTrace has a 41-chapter manual, a large part of which explains the usage of D, the DTrace language. Suspiciously similar to Awk, the D language provides a method by which administrators can ask arbitrary questions of the operating system.”

When I read the above sentences, I wondered why it was necessary to invent an Awk knock-off. Now we have this Boo stuff. The author of that language says that he is grateful to Guido van Rossum for inventing Python. If Python is so great, why not write extensions for it, instead of creating yet another clone ?

2005-02-18 9:07 pm

Anonymous
I agree, yet another clone

2005-02-18 9:37 pm

Anonymous
Just what the world needs – yet another programming language. What does this one have that the other 9,000 don’t?

Well, its a good thing this isnt another programming language, …

2005-02-18 9:49 pm

Anonymous
The difference is that Boo runs on .NET and leverages the existing .NET libraries as much as possible. It has nothing to do with “extensions”. The language is python-like, but not python. There’s also another language from the former Proton(or Prothon) guys that are doing something similiar.

2005-02-18 9:58 pm

Anonymous
Can someone please explain the deal with properties? As far as I can see all that you save is about 3 lines of code, at the expense of a more confusing syntax. Plus, you have to forget it if a set operation needs more than one argument… and yet they’re always rolled out as an example of how great C# is. (I also don’t see the point of delagates, I almost prefer the Swing method, but I’ll let that pass, I may just be being cynical

2005-02-18 10:28 pm

Anonymous
Hell, I’ve been asking the same thing about the ‘Ubuntu’ Linux distro for months. These people must be smoking some serious herb then they come up with names like that.

Heh, Ubuntu isn’t even such a bad name if you try to read the name of -> http://unununium.org

Two days ago I just received my few copies of Ubuntu I ordered so I will be cheking it out pretty soon.

Ubuntu means “humanity” in an African language. It’s a big world out there.

Yes, because so my Africans use Linux.

2005-02-19 3:22 am

Anonymous
The people who complained about it being a clone of Python obviously didn’t read anything about the language.

Aside from the other differences people have mentioned, it is statically typed by default (with type inference), which is a *huge* difference.

2005-02-19 4:56 am

Anonymous
Aside from the other differences people have mentioned, it is statically typed by default (with type inference), which is a *huge* difference.

—-

This is exactly right; Boo has support for “duck typing” and the like but the default action is to treat things as statically typed, which *should* result in a fairly significant speed up. I am of the opinion that Java is so fast (even though it runs through an interpreter of bytecode) because its statically typed so its interpreter has to do far less book keeping.

Static typing has been such an important issue that Guido has been considering adding an optional static typing system into Python. So far, from what I have seen, it will be called “Monkey Typing” (monkey see, monkey do?).. There is a hue manifesto about it out there on the net, but I was not able to fully grok it yet.

2005-02-19 5:09 am

Anonymous
Hopefully Guido copies Boo’s “as” syntax: I really don’t like reaching up to use the shift key so often.

2005-02-19 6:11 am

Anonymous
>(I also don’t see the point of delagates, I almost prefer the >Swing method, but I’ll let that pass, I may just be being >cynical

I find the way SWING handles events with inner classes very clumsy, delegates make life so much easier, they make me more productive, I have less to think about.

2005-02-20 5:31 pm

Anonymous
>> Can someone please explain the deal with properties? As far as I can see all that you save is about 3 lines of code, at the expense of a more confusing syntax. Plus, you have to forget it if a set operation needs more than one argument… and yet they’re always rolled out as an example of how great C# is. <<

My theory is they’re there primarily for tool support. Just like Java needed the JavaBeans conventions of get*/set*/is* in order to get designable components. With the Microsoft programming community’s focus on GUI designers, it should come as no surprise that .NET languages have explicit support for properties.

>> (I also don’t see the point of delagates, I almost prefer the Swing method, but I’ll let that pass, I may just be being cynical <<

They’re typesafe function pointers. What’s not to get?