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Comment by Jasber | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Io (http://iolanguage.com/). The description sounds like an appealing combination:

Its unusual, minimalist and yet elegant and powerful syntax reminds of Smalltalk, but the language goes far beyond that. Io is an object-oriented, prototype-based, message-based and fully-reflective programming language. This means that you use messages like in Smalltalk, you create objects like in Javascript and every bit of your code can be inspected and passed around as you see fit.

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I co-wrote (with Steve) SoundConverter for Windows:

http://dekorte.com/projects/shareware/SoundConverter/

The interface talks to an Io "server" which handles business logic.

We're currently working on a shopping aggregation startup. The crawler is written in Io.

Pixar's RenderMan image tool uses Io as its scripting language:

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/it.html

Io is still under development so you might run into the occasional bug. Bugs are encountered more often in the addons than in the core interpreter (which is stable).

Ah, I see you're the creator of Io. Do you know of any Io tools for Vim? Syntax and indent would be great if nothing else...Google didn't turn up anything.

No, Steve Dekorte is the creator of Io. I work with him on some projects (including Io).

I'm not sure about vim. I use TextMate (there is an Io bundle).

Oh, I saw the link and didn't read your username clearly. I have the TextMate bundle here...I suppose some interested person will have to get to writing a few io.vims :^)

Could someone provide more up-to-date Windows binaries of both the core and the addons?

I'll try to if I get some time. I haven't compiled on Windows in a while so I'm sure there are some bugs.

I played with Io a long time (like 4 or 5 years) ago, at which time it didn't seem ready for anything serious. I would expect it's gotten much better since then. It would be interesting to know what sort of apps are easy to build in it.

This author doesn't seem to know his subject very well, though. To say that an object-oriented, message-based, fully-reflective programming language goes "far beyond" Smalltalk suggests ignorance of how far Smalltalk goes.

As I hinted in the article, you're right: I didn't really experiment much with Smalltalk. Does Smalltalk allow the same level of reflection? Does it offer the same "freedom" as Io? I'm asking because I _presume_ it does not, but I honestly don't know.

Smalltalk blocks are objects that respond to messages about themselves, so yes, Smalltalk offers the same kind of reflection, in fact it invented it. (It's possible that Io takes it further in some respect, but I'd need to see details.)

So which (if any) of all these languages will you use to do a real project?

The very reason I wrote this article in the first place was that I couldn't make upmy mind. I am, as a matter of fact, interested in all of them: I was hoping you people could help me decide.

As a matter of fact, I work as a technical writer, so I'm not going to use any of these for any big project. However, I do code in my spare time and prepare small programs to automate tasks at work, when my boss lets me.

At the moment (literally) I'd like to try learning Haskell again, but it feels very difficult.

I was hoping you people could help me decide.

You're likely to just get people recommending their favorite.

If I were you I'd apply some combination of two criteria: which is the most fun, and what do I want to try to build?

It's great that you've done some broad experimentation (much more than I have). I suggest that you'll get a different and rewarding view if you try to use one of these languages to do something real that you care about.

I'm reading through the new _Real_World_Haskell_, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Do it in Haskell. The you can explain it to me. :-)

Tried Io a year back. Gave up after it crashed after a few tries. Add with it that it was one of the slowest in speed comparision tests.

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