News and Announcements forums?

[janssen]

Fora? I see that the last announcement was in 2008, and the last news is from 2009. Cobra seems like a nifty language, but that worries me... Any particular reason for that?

[Charles]

You can see on the front page that we have several announcements in 2010:

http://cobra-language.com/

This is my screw up. I need to post in both places or retire one of them. I'll think about it some more.

The project is alive and well. Thanks for bringing this up.

[BrendanSimon]

I love the sound of Cobra as a language, though I'm not convinced on the .NET/Mono dependency, but one of my main concerns is the perceived lack of news and activity. If the language is to take off then it needs momentum and active participation.

How many developers are there ??

How many users are there ??

Any real world apps have been written in Cobra ??

Personally, I'd like to use Cobra as a better Python (i.e. with out the .NET/Mono framework). Is that possible ?? Can it be run in it's on VM, or another VM ??

Keep up the good work though !!
Brendan.

[Charles]

What are your reservations on .NET/Mono? Do you think we should write our own String class, garbage collector, machine code generator, OpenGL bindings, etc.? If so, why?

Python uses a VM, but it's specific to Python. Cobra uses a VM, but it's shared by C#, VB and other languages.

Maybe you're worried about shipping an executable to an end user. On Windows, it's not an issue since Windows has .NET baked in. On Linux and Mac, you can package up your program with the mkbundle and macpack tools. Another example of leveraging benefits of Mono, rather than reinventing it.

I use Cobra as a better Python right now.

Regarding other back-ends, we have stubbed out some for JVM and Objective-C, but they are months or more away from being usable.

Regarding number of users, that is always hard to say with an open source language. I recall people asking the same of Python in 1999 and no one had a good method to determine the answer. One answer I have given for Cobra is: "The same number of users that Python had when it was fairly new."

Regarding apps, the compiler itself is written in Cobra and I occasionally will catch wind of someone working on an interesting project like a game or IDE. But we're still a small community and don't have a list like "users include Google, Disney, etc." or "apps include Apache and Call of Duty: Black Ops".

Regarding news and such, I need to get better at posting more of it and also resolve the difference between the front page news and the phpBB news forums. That will have to wait a week, as I'm going on vacation tomorrow.

[janssen]

Personally, I think the .NET platform is a better VM than the JVM, so I see no technical reason to port to the JVM.

But business logic, as opposed to technical reasoning, says different. Business process management software, for instance, is 83% JEE-based. To have a language play in many enterprise arenas, JVM integration is a must.

Doing an Obj-C port seems worse, though. No real VM there, is there?

As for the "no news" problem, why not switch to a more real system, perhaps one with mailing list support, like Google Groups?

[pchapin]

I'm interested in a JVM version of Cobra if only because I work on the JVM a lot in connection with other projects. It would certainly be nice to bring Cobra into that universe. I'm not clear on the technical differences between the systems but it wouldn't surprise me if the CLR has a technical edge. However, that doesn't mean creating a JVM back end for Cobra would be a waste of time, of course.

As an aside I'm a Scala user. It's a functional/OO hybrid for the JVM. The Scala community is working on a CLR version of the Scala compiler hoping to bring Scala to the .NET universe in an effective way. So the pressure to support both environments flows both ways.

[BrendanSimon]

My reservations over .NET/Mono are largely uninformed, but stem from :-
(a) being a Microsoft technology and not opensource, and being locked into their way of doing things.
(b) using a .NET clone (Mono) on OS X and Linux could cause problems if not 100% compatible (even after all these years OpenOffice is still not 100% compatible with Word documents).
(c) the presumption that .NET (and probably Mono) will be bloated (memory and cpu hogs) like all MS products usually are.

As I say, I am uniformed and I have a bias against Microsoft products and their business strategies/agenda, so I always get the heebie geebies when something so cool as Cobra is potentially tied to an MS technology.

Having said that, I think it is a very clever decision in terms of getting momentum and interest in Cobra as there a lot of people using .NET with C#, VB, etc, and being able to use Cobra along side those languages provides less hurdles for adoption in the MS software houses.

I have since done some googling re performance of Python VM versuss .NET/Mono versus JVM, and my conclusing is that Mono is faster than PVM, but probably not as fast as JVM, so moving to Cobra/Mono would be an improvement of pure Python (PyPy and others may be a different story?). I'm not sure of memory footprint of PVM v Mono.

OK, so I guess I need to write some apps in Python and Cobra and see what I think. I have an app that uses python-2.6, wxPython-2.8.11, pyserial, xml (using elementtree), pycrypto (AES, SHA1) and package them up in an OS X application using py2app. Are there direct equivalents using Cobra and associated libraries ??

[torial]

My reservations over .NET/Mono are largely uninformed, but stem from :-
(b) using a .NET clone (Mono) on OS X and Linux could cause problems if not 100% compatible (even after all these years OpenOffice is still not 100% compatible with Word documents).

Happily MS got their CLI under the ECMA standard, so it was far easier for the guys at Mono to implement than someone trying to reverse engineer the MS Office binary formats. If you are curious, here is the ECMA standard: http://www.ecma-international.org/publi ... ma-335.htm.

In terms of memory bloat -- that will depend on your coding practices. Compared to C, yeah, it'll have memory bloat. BUT compared to Java and Python, it should be comparable. If you end up looking at doing .Net development becuase you like Cobra, there is a site that does a bunch of benchmarking of different approaches to find the optimal approach (usually for speed, but sometimes for memory): http://www.dotnetperls.com/

HTH!

[gourD]

As for the "no news" problem, why not switch to a more real system, perhaps one with mailing list support, like Google Groups?

By looking at the forums I see the following:

Total members 6532

and browsing reveals there are lot of spam involving in it.

I know I'm an old-school guy preferring to use email for mailing lists or even better gmane-subscribed mailing list allowing me to use nntp which brings automatic archive. no need for sorting rules for my inbox, very easy to scan what's new, jump into discussions etc., while forums simply suck.

So, if there are users preferring web forums over mailing list, is it possible to setup some forum <---> mailing list gateway or just create mailing list as another option of support?

Gmane subscribed lists do not create spam due to usage of TMDA authorization mechanism and allow one to post without subscription...