Python3 function annotations for type hinting versus Boo
Question: I've started on a medium-sized project in python, and I decided to use python
3 because I'm not using any large external libraries and py3k has some nice
new syntactic sugar and more importantly function annotations. However, it
seems like none of WingIDE, Pydev, or pycharm actually have any support for
type hinting using function annotations. If I want something resembling static
typing in python, is switching to boo a reasonable option?


Answer: Boo is a **great** Python-like statically-typed language, but keep in mind
that there [more differences than just static
typing](http://boo.codehaus.org/Gotchas+for+Python+Users). Actually you can
also do [duck typing on Boo](http://boo.codehaus.org/Duck+Typing).

Technically, I'd say the biggest difference is that Boo runs on Mono/.Net so
the libraries and framework are _totally_ different.

[SharpDevelop](http://boo.codehaus.org/Boo+AddIn+For+SharpDevelop) and
[MonoDevelop](http://monodevelop.com) both have good support for Boo. There's
also a [Visual Studio 2010 plugin that adds Boo
support](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/8d15c62f-de0d-42f0-863a-daa8330d977a). It's still alpha, yet already
usable.

