The Cobra Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Cobra Programming Language

cobra-language.com

14 pointsmahmoudimus12 comments

Inspired by the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2144012

This all sounds nice and it probebly an improvment over C#, VB and Java but there are lots of langauges that have that.

This language looks nice and all but dosn't offer anything new and i can't see any concurrency primitves or somthing like that and today you should have that.

I'm not bashing the language it look really cool but I just don't think it has a chance of seeing wide adoption. You need some big selling point today.

Looks pretty interesting. Are there any other, more popular languages with such explicit support for tests and contracts?

Clojure has support. Another place where the metadata (http://clojure.org/metadata) comes in handy.

And since Clojure is a lisp you get an nice DSL to work with it: https://github.com/fogus/trammel

Don't put stuff in your language make your language easy to expand it.

The author mentions D as a language with these, but if I read it correctly, believes that his support for contracts is superior.

Eiffel was the original source of design-by-contract.

Good features, OK design, but probably won't gain traction due to reliance on .NET.

edit: out of genuine curiousity, why the downvote?

Following up on my reply, this post by the author of the language (on an unrelated forum) might illuminate the issue you were concerned with:

"Hi, I'm the author of the Cobra programming language. I didn't write the statement about it being intrinsically bound up in the .NET framework. In fact, I'm the guy who started two additional back-ends for JVM and Objective-C, as well as the refactoring necessary to support this. These are not complete, and I would love any and all help with these efforts. If you're interested, let me know. (Cobra is open source under the liberal MIT license.) In the mean time, Cobra runs on Novell Mono (which I use on Mac and Linux) and Microsoft .NET. You can learn more about Cobra at http://cobra-language.com/ -Chuck "

http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...

I didn't say it was intrinsically bound to .NET -- but it relies on it, right now. See: http://cobra-language.com/docs/why/

Hosting on .NET has given the author access to some very useful facilities. A VM that understands generics, with two major independent implementations, and a large ecosystem of code and tools.

But for many open source programmers, anything to do with Microsoft, even at arm's length, is seen as suspect. This is a cultural memory that can't easily be erased.

Hence my original remark: good language, but it will struggle to gain traction.

My (vague) guess would be that with the existence of Mono, which essentially gives something like this a universality, whomever down voted you thought you might have been MS bashing.

But yeah, I don't think your comment was out of line.

No repl is a bummer.

REPLs benefit from brief syntax; the Ada/C++ class of Algols don't benefit that much from it.

Scala closed the door on new programming languages.

Care to explain that further?

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