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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Reading the first few paragraphs, I note

    - heavy dependence on large (Mono) and/or unusual tools (nmake ... in 2024 ... really?)

    - worse than that, dependence on specific (older) versions of exotic, non-standard things

    - not much in the way of "this is what the language looks like" or "this is what this language is good at"

    - the windows world smell surrounding the project is pungent, to say the least

Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.

I hope for the sake of the project this is a temporary state of affairs.

[EDIT]: a maybe slightly better intro to the language than the github page:

https://boo-language.github.io/

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There is a lot to read in their wiki, https://github.com/boo-lang/boo/wiki

>Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.

Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone.

For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to download Java Runtime Environment (~100 MB) and unpack it, and then download Eclipse IDE (~100 MB) and unpack it. When you downloaded both archive files already it took a few seconds to unpack it and double-click on the eclipse.exe.

The last real commit was 7yrs ago, I don't think it's temporary.

Yeah, good point.

That also makes some of my remarks kind of irrelevant.

Mono is not large. It is, however, outdated. That is, the Mono that is used here. Otherwise, you should really not use it over vanilla .NET's CoreCLR.

(and surely you can do better than immediately resort to "the windows world smell surrounding the project is pungent"?)

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