Simple Talk Articles

[Charles]

I was interviewed as "Geek of the Week" for the Simple Talk newsletter and web site.

And an intro article was written for Cobra as well.

Don't forget the 5 star rating at the bottom!

[CodexArcanum]

It was actually a bump in the RedGate newsletter (which linked to this interview I think) which brought me over here! I'm always looking at new langauges, trying to see what hits that sweet spot between fun features and being practical and useful for actual problems. Having gotten a decent feel for Haskell and gotten board of F# (I'll need to go back to it, but my brain aches from dealing with functional languages for new long), I was kind of looking around for something new to play with. Python seemed like a good choice to round myself out with a solid scripting language, but I can never think of any problems I want to solve that Python would really be right for. It's easy to write but I always worry the performance would come back to haunt me.

So the link to Cobra came at a pretty good time. It has that pythonic appearance, with the whitespace rule and some convenient sugar in certain constructs, but builds down to CLR code so I'm still getting most any benefits that C# might have gotten me. There's also the exciting possibility that a program done in Cobra could one day be rebuilt to target Java or Objective-C, so I could target multiple platforms very easily.

It's a very nice language, I'm hoping to continue exploring it with my sample project and seeing if the built-in unit tests and contracts actually do help me to be more safe and productive.