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Comment by dasboot | Hacker News Reader

I only played around with it a long time ago. Very interesting language indeed. You may also like Ioke (http://ioke.org/) - a jvm based language that is directly inspired by Io.

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Ioke is lovely. Not particularly practical, but I had a ton of fun learning and contributing to it. More friendly and approachable and (if I understand Ola correctly) explicitly macro-friendly than Io. I think of it as the ultimate DSL language.

Also, fully translatable. Check out Hindi: http://github.com/olabini/ioke/blob/master/examples/multilan...

In what ways is it more macro-friendly?

Does it have all the same capabilities? Is it able to introspect into it's own code and monkey-patch like regular Io?

Yes. Prototype-based, and code is traversable as a data structure. Macro and monkey-patch to your heart's content. Java interop is solid.

I've heard various complaints that the language is extremely slow. have you found this to be a valid concern?

Ioke is slower than Io. Both languages probably by design will never be trail blazers I think.

Here is Ioke's author view on its speed: http://olabini.com/blog/2009/01/iokes-need-for-speed/

This sounds really intriguing, thank you!

I've been looking for a post-lisp for some time now, and while I find Clojure very entertaining, RH took making it a Lisp seriously. This constrains it from the complete and utter evil I can accomplish with Io.

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