Is Cobra alive and well

[DelphiGuy]

i was introduced to .net by using cobra. although i barely qualify as even a "bad" programmer, i abandoned cobra and am writing in C# these days simply because of microsoft/xamarin's direction. (well, i still use cobra for my smaller non-"mobile" projects that i have no intention of distributing.)

i fume daily that charles spoiled me with cobra. C# is super annoying for me to use, and i often curse at some over-elaborate and counter-intuitive C# construction. since charles proved unequivocally that (1) a FAR more economical and ergonomic language can be created as a full-powered abstraction of .net, and that (2) we're not in 1985 anymore and therefore modern computers have plenty of horsepower available for the purpose of offsetting some important aspects of programmers' tedious manual labor (and even thinking) onto the compiler -- i scratch my head wondering why microsoft doesn't hire him as "Special Envoy for Common Sense in Modern .Net Language Design". how on earth would they not get their money's worth, for his salary?

even if the MS gods don't want cobra, you'd think they'd welcome him as a consultant to steer VB.net and C# in more ergonomic directions, particularly since charles' legacy so far isn't even one of requiring a change in .net!

regarding xamarin and cobra, seems to me that the obvious place for cobra in the context of xamarin is to be able to produce PCLs, since i believe that once that's accomplished, mobile writers would have free reign to write all of their "engine" code in cobra, even if the GUI stuff has to be done in C#. of course, that requires work and sounds like charles, rather than needing more work on his cobra "to do" list, currently could benefit from winning the lottery and spending 6 months at a mud-mask, massage spa. and who would even use cobra for PCLs, other than me? and i'm not a good enough programmer to do the port myself.

charles, did you ever ask xamarin why they took "the strange route of basing their tool on C# source code rather than the usual .NET approach of working at the bytecode level for such technical feats"? i seem to recall that you mused once that you might write to miguel. just curious, really.

anyway, again i thank you, charles, for showing me how a language really should be implemented strictly for the benefit of the programmer and productivity, rather than for the benefit of honoring rigid tradition.

[relez]

I was one of the first Cobra fans and i can state that it's a great Language. My job took me far from .Net and writing code in general but i'm near programming language world. I talked to many people about many emerging programming languages trying to promote use of new Language as alternatives to usuals. My impression is that some smart management are not so much opposed to the use of new languages. They have problems introducing them to their programmers due to the lack of documentation. I was successfull introducing Go, there are books and docs on the net, i failed with Falcon, Cobra (Seed 7 is another story) and even Fantom because it is a difficult job to retrieve complete and structured informations, examples and so on. Some managers are fans Dart(!) and another is interested in Rust because their site is quite rich in docs. Even Julia Language is really appreciated and one reason, someone told me, is that code writers can easily ( + or -) find informations and help. I think that getting to the 1.0 version and working on documents (maybe a book), and examples, could be a good way to revitalize the Language. Ok, i know it is not a simple task.... good work Charles and thanks anyway for Cobra.