Cobra language gets major update

Currently for .NET, JVM in the pipeline.

Cobra language gets major update
cobra-language.com

Am I the only one who read it as: The Clean Language (as in the functional languagel CLean) and powerful Cobra Language gets major update.

The docs aren't loading for me, but my first question was, why create a language that is almost, but not quite, exactly like Python syntax? Why give up compatibility with that whole community in exchange for minor syntax changes? (I don't mean the language extensions, like contracts, but the random tweaks that would stop you from running Python code directly in Cobra.) Here are some cached answers on that:

Why Cobra? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7djdaz...

and

Cobra compared to Python: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GmrbTK9...

It sounds like basically the adoption strategy is to sell people coming from .NET on a Python-like language with binary compatibility, rather than to sell people coming from Python on a statically typed, compiled language with source compatibility. So, not as much for me as a Python person, until the ecosystem evolves. Too bad, because it doesn't seem like there was much of a win from giving up forward compatibility. But maybe a cool thing for .NET people?

This looks promising. Nothing that has never been done before, but I really like the support for baked in doctests and contracts. This kind of sugar can make a real difference in terms of quality and readability

    #from the website, because it seems to be down for many right now.

    class SmallSample
	var _random = Random() 
	def randomString(length as int, alphabet as String) as String
		require
			length > 0
			alphabet  ''
		ensure
			result.length == length
		test
			utils = SmallSample()
			assert utils.randomString(5, 'ab').length == 5
			s = utils.randomString(1000, 'a')
			for c in s, assert c == 'a'
		body
			sb = StringBuilder()
			for i in length
			c = alphabet[_random.next(alphabet.length)]
			sb.append(c)
			return sb.toString

> once the site speeds up.

That means when the interest in the language drops to near zero again... I don't know, maybe the authors or maintainers of a web page should be warned before posting the link on Hacker News? I'm angry, because I find Cobra to be one of very nice languages that I'd like to see used more - and hn'ed site does not do any good on that front :/

I was playing with Cobra about a year ago and it was promising then - now it looks like it's almost ready for prime time. I think I'll try to use it for my next project.