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by shriramkmurthi 4109 days ago
First time I'm seeing Cobra. Of course, there's a 100 altjs languages out there. It's certainly cute. But every Cobra file seems to begin with "class". I have no idea why I'd want to subject a poor child to that nonsense.

Just to be clear, the flip side of Racket's 20 years of work is it is _very sophisticated_. Pyret has nowhere near the same sophistication.

1 comments

Cobra compiles to CIL and runs on Mono/.Net runtimes. I think its philosophy is close to Pyret: they both seem to be taking the best ideas from different languages and trying to integrate them into one nice package. There are some similarities in features chosen, but I'm not working with either, so I can't do a deeper comparison.
The platform is a pretty big difference. One of the major problems we run into in the education space is that many schools _cannot_ install any new software. Running on the browser is pretty much the only thing they can do. We created WeScheme (http://www.wescheme.org/, http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/yk-wha...) precisely for this reason, and Pyret is also engineered around this need. If you require a compiler and/or runtime download/install, you are excluding yourself from numerous schools, _especially_ poorer ones. We're really concerned about not amplifying these problems!