Cobra language goes to open source

IDG News Service — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:58:34 -0500

As planned, the Cobra language was made available via open source late last week, the developer of the language said this week.

In addition to offering the language as open source, Cobra author Charles Esterbrook has added a Subversion-based repository.

"The advantage here is that it enables users to conveniently update their copy of the code at any time with a single command (svn up). It's also the basis for someone to contribute an improvement back to the project," Esterbrook said in an e-mail.

Cobra is a .Net-based programming language that attempts to mix productivity boosters scattered across multiple languages. Users would get dynamic binding featured in Objective-C and quick coding of Python and Ruby, for example.

"My plan for March is to cut one to two releases that will once again be driven by user feedback," Esterbrook said. "Support for Cobra will be ongoing through the new discussion boards. I'm also looking forward to getting open source contributions, but of course, it will take some time for people to get familiar with the existing code base."

Cobra is available here under the open-source MIT license. The current download is Cobra 0.7.4. The 1.0 release is planned for later this year.