I'm happy to announce that Cobra 0.9.6 has been released full of refinements and fixes. As usual, there is a package for Windows and another for Mac/Linux/Unix-like.

Thanks to everyone who contributed through patches, bug reports, help with the web site, satellite projects like MonoDevelop/Xamarin, etc. Credits are on the release notes wiki page.

There have also been a number of improvements to the MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio add-in for Cobra. The latest version includes support for mouseover tooltips, method parameter completion tooltips, support for building a Cobra project file using MSBuild or XBuild, and a new Go To Declaration right-click command.

You can now install the add-in using the MonoDevelop Add-In Manager. Add the http://mdrepo.ramonrocha.com/ repository using the Add-In Manager to install the precompiled add-in package. This repository hosts the latest stable versions of the add-in. If you prefer the latest development version, you can install from source using the master branch on the GitHub repository at https://github.com/ramon-rocha/MonoDevelop.CobraBinding. See the README.md file for more details on installing from source and how you can help contribute with development or testing.

Please help get the word out to friends and colleagues.

http://cobra-language.com/downloads/

http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki/ReleaseNotes_0.9.6

Cobra 0.9.4 has been released today. Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Codes fast, runs fast.

Cobra is a community-driven, open source project under the MIT license.

Cobra 0.9.2 is released.

This point release of Cobra has 30 refinements and fixes. Enjoy.

Cobra runs on .NET 2.0+ and Mono 2.6+. A JVM back-end is underway.

Cobra is a community-driven, open source project under the MIT license.

Cobra 0.9 has been released

The newly released Cobra 0.9 provides language refinements, library additions, new samples, new koans, an improved @help directive and expanded documentation. Of course, plenty of bugs have been squashed and locked out with an expanded test suite. See the official release notes for full details.

Cobra runs on .NET 2.0+ and Mono 2.6+. A JVM back-end is underway.

Cobra is a community-driven, open source project under the MIT license.

Update for August 2011

Well apparently I'm not a consistent blogger. I do, however, participate in the Cobra discussion group and the Cobra IRC channel on a regular basis. I have also been applying patches and making improvements which you can see on the Trac Timeline page.

Finally, I encourage people to take a look at the latest Help Wanted post to see if something catches your interest.

Cobra 2010-10-18

A new version of the Cobra programming language, dubbed "Cobra 2010-10-18", has been released. This new version has several additions and refinements to both the language and the libraries. There have also been numerous fixes.

Release notes have been posted to the discussion forums and the downloads are ready.

The "How To" and "Sample" programs on the web site (and included in the release) have been expanded and updated.

Cobra 2010-04-02 Released

A new version of the Cobra programming language, dubbed "Cobra 2010-04-02", has been released. This new version has several additions and refinements to both the language and the libraries. There have also been numerous fixes.

Release notes have been posted to the discussion forums and the downloads are ready.

The "How To" and "Sample" programs on the web site (and included in the release) have been expanded and updated.

New Cobra Slides

I presented Cobra to the Architecture SIG folks of the San Diego .NET Users Group. You can view the PDF Slides to learn more about Cobra.

New Sample Program Evolves Solutions

Are you familiar with the genetic algorithm (GA)? If not, the doc string contains the requisite Wikipedia links to the topic.

Genetic Algorithm Sample in Cobra

Presentation in San Diego

I'm presenting Cobra in San Diego to a .NET group on Wed Jun 10. If you're in the area and you're new to Cobra, or you'd just like to meet up, then come join the fun.

Information here.

Reaping The Benefits Of Cobra

MSDN Magazine has published an article, Reaping The Benefits Of Cobra by Ted Neward. There's nice coverage of key Cobra features and their advantages.

MSDN Low Bandwidth Bookmarklet

The MSDN web site is full of great information, but runs too slow and is too awkward for my taste. If it could actually remember my preference to exclude examples for certain languages from the documentation, maybe it would be worth it. But since it cannot, it becomes an example of "too many bells and whistles".

Fortunately, they have a "low bandwidth" version that not only loads faster, but is easier to navigate.

Jon Galloway documented this some time ago with a nice "bookmarklet" for toggling the MSDN mode. I actually expect to read more of the MSDN material now!

Cobra April 2009 Update and Release

The Cobra April 2009 Update has been posted and Release 2009-04-30 was recently made. It features the usual round of improvements such as refinements to the language, more library conveniences and the occasional bug fix. Also, the installer is more robust.

See the update for full details.

Counting Sheep

Baa!

Cobra March 2009 Update

The update for March has been posted. Most notable are HTML syntax highlighting of source files and new sample programs.

Cobra Release 2009-04-07

Due to fixes and refinements, you'll want to upgrade if you're using any previous release. Or, if you're using Cobra from a Subversion workspace, you can just update at any time and run install-from-workspace in the Source\ directory.

Discussion thread / Announcement

Download

See the ReadMe.text file after unzipping.

Btw if you're using Novell Mono, do not use version 2.2. It has one or more bugs which make it unusable with Cobra. Use 2.4+ or an earlier version such as 2.0.

Have you played Arimaa?

I found a wonderful new game called "Arimaa". It's a turn-based game, vaguely similar to chess, with an 8x8 board and different classes of pieces. It's one of those well designed games that is rather easy to learn, but challenging to master. There are many aspects of the game to discover and explore; I've only just started.

Arimaa was actually created for AI research purposes in response to the defeat of world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, at the hands of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. Arimaa has many more choices per turn and some other interesting properties. As a consequence, the best computer "bots" cannot currently defeat the best human players. There is a prize of $17,000 for the first bot that can. Naturally, I hope the winning bot will be written in Cobra. :-)

Omar Syed, the creator of the game, is a computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. He runs a great site with instructions, wiki, forums, internet game room, bot API, etc. You can even order a physical game set.

Given Arimaa's design goal of challenging AI researchers, I was expecting that it might be boring, but it was just the opposite! Arimaa is fun in and of itself.

You can learn more about it at:

• Wikipedia:Arimaa


• Arimaa.com


• BoardGameGeek:Arimaa

Cobra March 2009 Help Wanted

Want to help with an open source project? Today's post on "Help Wanted" outlines a number of ideas that you might find interesting.

Cobra February 2009 Update

February's update includes mixins, lambdas, constants and new documentation. Check out the Cobra February 2009 Update for more information. Or dive in now by getting the latest and exploring the docs and the wiki.

Informal Releases

I've decided to start a lightweight process I call "Informal Releases" which can be made quickly and which leverage the existing install-from-workspace script. However, you don't have to use Subversion to get such a release. You just download a zip file.

Making such a release is much less work for me than an official one, so I expect to make 1 - 4 of these per month. They don't replace the future official releases such as Cobra 0.9, 0.9.1, 1.0, etc. But they do give you early access to new features.

This is for folks are not comfortable installing Cobra out of a Subversion workspace. It's easy enough to do, but users may prefer to download a hand-picked snapshot instead.

Another route could have been to fully automate the build of a nightly package, but then you don't know if you're downloading a stable package when it's blindly made at the same time every day. In contrast, I'll cut an informal release when I'm fairly confident that the Cobra source repository is stable and has something worthwhile to offer over the last one.

You can, of course, continue to use a Subversion workspace.

There is a discussion thread on this topic which includes the link to Cobra 2009-03-01.