The lack of Boo love

Scripting
1

I was wondering why there seems to be very little love for Boo here.

Is it mainly because it’s not supported on iPhone, and the majority of developers here are working on games for the iPhone?

Is it the lack of documentation?

Is it something inherent to the language itself? Is it less capable than other languages in some way? From what little I understand, it’s actually more capable than JS, but I’m FAR from knowledgeable on the matter.

Also, how close to Python is it? Will knowing Python pretty much translate to knowing 90%+ of Boo?

2

I’d be using Boo if it were supported on the iPhone.

But lack of documentation probably keeps a lot of people away.

3

I think it´s not just a because of iPhone. Python is used in many areas, but for scripting games, developers, for many reasons, tend to use other languages, like Lua or game engine specific languanges, like UnrealScript or even the JavaScript version of Unity. In my opinion it´s just a matter of lack of tradition in using Python to game development. I think CCP used Python as a scripting language for EVE-Online MMO.

There are some differences, like in the inheritance process, but it´s almost like you wrote

4

in my case its more that im more used to unity script or C# than boo

the lack of documentation and an unfamiliar environment

also there are better tools for unityscript and C#

for example i use unity develop for unityscript and visual C# 2008 for C# (im currently using windows)

so boo for me is a bit strange and unfamiliar and i feel its pointless to me to use it

5

I would guess that a large part of the unlove about python / boo is the language itself.

as nice as it is, it has a feel of “Basic”, which isn’t everyones thing. That python even goes as far to missuse /enforce code format as compiler code structure likely does not make it better.

Its as such even less “like normal programming languages” (even basic is closer to that), which makes it less interesting to learn as the gained knowledge is only partially usable in other fields.
C#, Java or ActionScript are much more usefull languaes to learn as they are widely used in the industry and with unityscript beeing familiar to ActionScript 3 and C# just beeing C#, its at least to me normal that those are the languages that get the main focus and not Boo.

Also as pointed out above, python is not exactly the game dev language. Its used in some server backends (from what I know the EVE server is pretty much pure python, same for the Torque MMOKit server) among the industry but otherwise its at best seen in scientific 3d usage for scripting and linux environments, which also means that there won’t be many switching technology that are interested or even capable using it.

6

Missuse?

If you properly format your code to begin with, Python’s use of whitespace should be second nature. And it makes for much more readable code. Perhaps some people like semi-colons and curly brackets everywhere, but I’m not one of them.

It’s widely used for game development on linux. See pygame and pyglet game engines.

7

Once/If Unity gets ported to Linux you’ll see an upsurge in Boo love.

8

The use of whitespace indicating something of significance to the compiler, reminds me too much of RPG/II and it’s columnar format. Most of the people using it were elated when free format source code came about with RPG/400 and considered it an advance!

9

Just an observation…

I will say that while Boo use and support seems to be pretty small, the people who use Boo appear to love using it more than people using the other languages with Unity.

I’d say that the passion for languages appears to go like this…

  1. Boo
  2. C#
  3. JavaScript

But the actual use of languages with Unity looks like

  1. JavaScript
  2. C#
  3. Boo

If the iPhone supported Boo, I wonder how things would change.

I’m pretty sure that we’d see an increase in Boo use, but how much? And if it was used more, would the passion for it be less?

10

I am begging to dip my toes in the bath of Boo but through it’s benefits the drawbacks are a little off putting.

Out of interest why doesn’t the iPhone support Boo, is it something that could/will be fixed or is it just a no no from start to finish. If Unity were further extended to the iPad (come on of course it will) would the same issue persist?

I would like to see more out there in terms of Boo documentation but it seems at this rate it would mean I’d have to spend a few months learning it and make them myself.

11

Potentially because the effort to make boo work with static typing (or even introduce the features required to do so) would make it a bit hard given that hardly nobodies uses it, potentially because boo does not like aot compilation at all, cause there is no dynamic typing on the iphone due to AOT

12

Personally, I think Python’s whitespace is a major improvement over C++ - death to braces :slight_smile:

But I’m actually using C# in Unity, purely for Visual C# Express, a great editor. I can’t live without Auto-completion…

John C>
“For all your days, prepare, and meet them ever alike;
When you are the anvil, bear - when the hammer, strike.”