[api]

I don't know, but Boston is C++. Its mixture of hacker culture, hyper-IQ academia, and classical puritan social values is sort of like implementing closures with template metaprogramming and special #ifdefs everywhere for compiler backward compatibility.

It's puritan social values plus academic liberalism plus nerds. It is backward compatible but not strictly a superset.

Comparing cities to programming languages thread GO!

[zackattack]

Do you think Boston is the best city for nerds? I'm looking for a genuinely pro-intellectual climate.

[api]

It's pro-intellectual, but it's also a bit stuffy and introverted.

If you like the quiet life, lots of academic options, and very tame social gatherings then Boston is for you. If you like excitement, extraverted social culture, and lots of new experiences then I'd look at SF.

Boston has some plusses: it's a walking city... possibly the only true walking city in the country (of any size). You do not need a car. It's ridiculously safe for a big urban area. Bostonians' idea of a bad neighborhood is one without a Starbucks in eye-shot. It's very economically healthy and has a lot of good high paying techie jobs.

But some of that could be said about SF too... just not the walking city part. (Well, SF proper can be handled without a car, but all the techie stuff is in the valley which is a car-centric suburb.)

Both are among the nicest cities in the country.

[ChristianPerry]

I moved from SF to Boston about six months ago.

SF is a great place to build a startup, but a lousy place to live. I never felt like I could really be myself there (despite meeting hundreds of supposedly like-minded people).

Bostonians are far less friendly on the surface, but man, you can really get to know them. People are nerdy, intellectual, informed (and not just about tech), opinionated, and largely quite sane.

The pace of the city is slower, too, in a way that I appreciate. When I go to a tech event here, I'll often meet someone and spend an hour locked in conversation with them. That kind of deep, engaged conversation never happened in SF, where people are perpetually on the go, and cutting from one thing to the next.

Outside of work, Boston (and by this I specifically mean Cambridge and Somerville -- or "Camberville" as we call it) is the best place in the country to be a nerd. The place is filled with swing dancers, LARPers, grad students, cult movie screenings, comic book and game shops, and quite possibly more CTY alumni than any other city.

Simultaneously, we've got a lot of general culture, too -- lectures, theater, good food, and so on.

Stuffy and introverted? Sure, a bit. But you can get past that quickly, and discover a wonderful place to live.