When comparing Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) vs Boo, the Slant community recommends Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages to learn for someone coming from Python?” Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) is ranked 12th while Boo is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Xonsh (The Xonsh Shell) is:
Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to understand, Python-like syntax
Xonsh uses a syntax which is a superset of Python 3.4 plus some additional shell primitives. Because of the similarity to Python, which is famously an easy to understand programming language, the syntax of Xonsh is pretty easy to grasp too, even more so for Python programmers.
Pro Extensible
Most parts of xonsh are extensible. You can change tab-completer, prompt, history backend, aliases, functions and pack it to special package (called "xontrib") and put it on Github. The logic are clear and documented well.
Pro Portable
The xonsh shell has AppImage that makes it Linux-portable.
Pro Command history on steroids - including output
Xonsh has one feature that can be considered particularly unique. It stores not just the commands you type, but their output, and doing a search on your history (configurably) can search the output as well.
Pro Cross platform support
Xonsh has native cross-platform support.
Pro IDE support
The open-source #develop comes with Boo support.
Pro Static type safety
This also improves performance as compared to IronPython. You can still use duck typing if you want, but you mostly don't need to since Boo can infer the type based on context.
Pro Inter-operates with other .NET languages
Boo runs on the .NET platform, so you can pretty much use it for anything C# is good for.
Pro One of Unity's supported languages
Use your Python skills to make games.
Pro Familiar syntax
Boo's syntax was heavily influenced by Python's, but makes some improvements like macros and multi-line lambdas.
Cons
Con The documentation isn't as good as Python's
There are some Boo textbooks. You can also find examples of Boo's language features in the Git repository, but it doesn't seem to have a thorough description of the language itself like Python does.