When comparing Racket vs Boo, the Slant community recommends Racket for most people. In the question“What are the best languages to learn for someone coming from Python?” Racket is ranked 9th while Boo is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Racket is:
Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook
Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.
Pro Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start
Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets)
Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up.
Pro Free resources to Learn
Includes several free online books and great documentation.
Pro Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket
Pro Active community
Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.
Pro Syntax fits to functional programming
Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming.
Pro Subtly encourages functional programming
Racket makes it inconvenient to pursue imperative habits while encouraging functional programming by Lisps's syntax. For example, the syntax for defining a function is almost the exact same as defining a variable. In addition, Racket has a strong set of higher-order functions built in to the language.
Pro Easily embeddable
Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed.
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.