I've got to admit, I've got my reservations about Boo.  There's the take-up question, which wasn't a big deal before the DLR came striding into town, but is much more important now that there are other ways to skin this particular cat.  Then there's the extensible syntax, which is one of the most powerful shotguns I've ever seen.  They've even helpfully set it up to point at your foot by default. Fact remains, I've just done some work for the Castle project that uses Boo for its DSL.  Again, I've gone for the "just get it working" approach, so...

Okay, let's go over the basic DSL argument: You need to configure something It can behave in very different ways in different environments The data model is subject to change and in any event not easily represented by a relational database These are pretty much exactly the use cases for Composite and Chain of Responsibility patterns.  But that's one of those "raises as many questions as it answers" things.  How are you going to configure it?  Well, until the advent of embeddable scripting languages, the...

I've converted over my Retlang spider example over to IronPython in order to get a feel for the differences.  Here's some notes: Python list comprehensions can do the same as LINQ for simple cases, but LINQ is much more powerful, and it supports deferred execution, while list comprehensions are evaluated greedily.  UPDATE: Thanks to Mark for pointing out that generators support deferred execution.  There's still no syntax for grouping or ordering, but these are relatively rare cases. Every description of the python syntax I ever see emphasizes the fact you don't...

I mean, seriously, how is someone expected to debug this? The bit I really dislike: try to spot where the name of the function that threw the error.  I guess it'll be slicker when it's finished... For that matter, I'd rather not see this appear, either: In fairness, many of Boo's error messages are pretty useless. Technorati Tags: IronPython