Cobra roadmap

[chris]

Hi Chuck,

I just came across Cobra while scanning through the Mono web pages - I must say this is the language I have waited for! Support for contracts, language-integrated unit tests, python-like syntax but even clearer, static and dynamic typing, etc. etc. This is just "wow".

And while reading the Lang.NET slides I found that more impressive features are still to come - which brings me to the topic of this posting: Is there any roadmap for Cobra available or in the making? Not so much regarding time or speed of progress but rather regarding feature milestones; such as what will be part of Cobra 1.0 when it arrives.

Thanks,
Christoph

[Charles]

Thanks for the positive feedback and excellent question!

There's no formal roadmap, but there are things that weigh heavily on my mind and are high priority:

-- Get 0.8 out the door, hopefully this week. It's waaay better than the current 0.7.4 release. See Intermediate Release Notes (and realize that's a link to the current version so it will change after each release!). (Chuck)

-- More work on the instructive How To's. I just added three in Subversion with help from Max, but won't upload until the 0.8 release. (Anyone)

-- Start work on Visual Cobra. While Cobra itself is open source, Visual Cobra will be my commercial effort. (Chuck)

-- Write up a list of things people could be contributing to Cobra. Some of these are below. Some are more nitty gritty and not on this list. (Chuck)

-- Write up guidelines for submitting patches. (Chuck)

-- Squash all bugs with extreme prejudice. (Anyone)

-- Get some web examples going whether that's MS ASP.NET, Novell xsp, Spring.NET, Castle, whatever. (Anyone)

-- Declare .NET events. (Can already consume them.) (Anyone)

-- Consume and declare operator overloads. (Anyone)

-- Generic methods. (Anyone)

-- Anonymous methods and lambdas like C# 3.0 has. (Python also has lambdas.) (Anyone)

-- Bona fide LINQ in all its glory. Probably not strictly required for Cobra 1.0, but will probably get done by that time anyway. (Anyone)

-- Write a CPU intensive program such as a neural net in both Cobra and Python. Show how both are clean and easy to maintain. Then show the performance difference. (Anyone)

There are other things, but those are some of the highlights. I tagged the ones that make sense for me to do as (Chuck) and the others as (Anyone). I realize a more exhaustive list and implementation hints on some of these would greatly help others contribute. I'll do that right after 0.8.

Regarding stability, I killed 32 bugs in Feb and 25 in Mar. April is only 4 so far. Cobra is definitely getting more stable and capable quickly. Recent reports have been more positive. But there is still much to do!

[chris]

Thanks Chuck for this detailed list.

More work on the instructive How To's.

Once I am a bit up to speed with Corba I can start with this one (provided that I'll have some ideas for new HowTo's

Regards,
Christoph

[Charles]

One way to get more ideas for the How To's is to go through all the test cases, asking what's not covered. Just don't take the test cases as examples of good coding style. Some of them are older when Cobra was less capable and some of them are abstract or weird because they are just testing language features, not setting good examples.

Another approach would be to work backwards through the release notes asking the same question.

The major stimulus so far has been what questions people ask here in the discussion forums. And that was good for a start.