Cobra vs Boo Please?

[jheiselman]

I am a long time Python user and like the language a lot. That said, I think Python's momentum is starting to run out. There are still improvements being made and still higher adoption rates in the corporate worlds, but many people are afraid to move to Python 3 and a few companies that make products I use are moving to other languages as they meet technical challenges with Python.

I've tried out Boo in the past and liked it a lot. Clean, Python inspired syntax. Static types that are inferred to save typing. Mono/.NET support.

I was wondering if someone would be able to provide a comparison of Cobra to Boo as is available for Python in the docs. The Python version was quite informative and told me all I need to know in that regard. Just hoping for the same for Boo.

Thank you in advance.

EDIT: fix grammar/ spelling

[Charles]

Hi, and welcome to the Cobra community.

I was able to write a good comparison with Python because I have cranked out a lot of Python (and I'm the author of Cobra). Back in Nov 2008, I was able to make a reasonable comparison to Boo here in the discussion forum because I had previously used it and was tracking it to some extent. You may find that discussion informative, but it may also be out of date.

I'm not watching Boo as closely as before. Cobra has its own concerns and I'm busy with pushing it forward such as the recent @help feature I designed and will be working on today. So if you, or anyone else, discover anything not covered in the above discussion, or already have comments to contribute, feel free to do so in this thread.

P.S. If you are familiar with Ruby, there is a wiki comparison page which I wrote during a contract I did in Ruby.

P.S.S. If you play with Cobra, please install from source. It's safe, effective and gets you a better version.

[jheiselman]

Thank you very much. Somehow I missed that thread when I searched. I like the direction you are taking Cobra and will definitely be trying out the source version as you suggest.

One last question I have us that you state that Cobra targets .NET and Mono, but do you intend to ensure it will always work with Mono or is your primary platform focus .NET? I've seen a couple of projects that start off trying to support Mono, but as they gain developers who are only familiar with .NET, bits of the code end up being dependant on .NET and then they end up dropping support for Mono as they don't have time to reimplement code.

[Charles]

You'll love this answer: I do > 90% of my Cobra development with Mono on Mac. Currently Mono 2.10. I prefer Mac for desktop and Linux for servers so great Mono support is a must for me.

I also test Cobra on Windows and occasionally use it there, but I know Windows is popular enough that the rest of the community has it covered.