Hi, I was offline and missed the large discussion so let me just add my 2c:
Cobra is currently at a "late alpha" stage. There are some docs (including a comparison to Python) and examples. (And pardon my plain looking web site, but I have no graphics skills.) Here it is: http://cobralang.com/
Nice :). You might want to check another open-source .Net language called Nemerle (nemerle.org). It is quite stable now, reasonably efficient and has bindings to some IDEs (VS, monodevelop). It is majorly a functional language and not that python-like, but it has a special option that allows you to switch to python-like syntax (white-space and newline delimiters, etc.). And it has very nice lisp-like macros :).
Far and away, the best answer to the best language question is the .NET framework. If you're using the framework, you can use any language that has been implemented on the framework (which includes everything from C# to the OCAML-like F# and nearly every language in between -- those obviously many implementations are better than others) AND you can easily intermix languages (so the answer to best language will vary from piece to piece).
Unluckily, after being involved in .Net for quite some time, I do not share your optimism. In fact I came to think that .Net is not suitable for anything that requires really high performance and parallelism. Perhaps the problem is just that it is very very hard to build a really good VM and probably impossible to build one that will be good for more than one programming paradigm. As long as you do imperative OO programming .Net might be ok and your comments about mixing languages are right. But if you start doing functional and generative programming it will be a pain and a performance bottleneck. In that case you need things like MetaOCaml (www.metaocaml.org) for generative programming or OCamlP3l for easy parallelism (ocamlp3l.inria.fr/eng.htm). - lk ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
