Common Lisp vs Boo
When comparing Common Lisp vs Boo, the Slant community recommends Common Lisp for most people. In the question“What are the best languages to learn for someone coming from Python?” Common Lisp is ranked 5th while Boo is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Common Lisp is:
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
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Pros
Pro Carefully designed for interactive use
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Pro Very Powerful REPL with SLIME
SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs).
Pro Condition/restart system
It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL.
Pro Image based runtime
The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program.
Pro Almost as fast as, or faster than, C
Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code.
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.