Ioke 0 released

olabini.com

19 points·jjames··5 comments

The Origin mimic parallel to Io's Object clone seems like it was named like that only because he didn't want to use Io's semantics verbatim, which results in it reading awkwardly. Just use Object clone >:[ Otherwise, a very cool project

Yeah, this is going to be interesting. I hope it takes hold, somewhere.

In what way(s) is Ioke superior to, say, PLT Scheme or Clojure?

I don't think it's necessarily superior. I played with Io a long time ago, and my first thought was: "This is lisp/scheme with a different syntax."

Personally, I think embedability, its syntax, and prototype orientation are great. Especially with javascript becoming so pervasive, other prototype-oriented languages are a great addition, especially since js is not traditionally geared towards running outside a browser.

If Ioke gets concurrency right and is sufficiently fast (around ruby or python) I think it will be an awesome language. I'm very excited about it.

You might want to look at Lua. It's significantly faster than Python (particularly with the LuaJIT compiler! (http://luajit.org/luajit_performance.html), can also be used as a prototype-based language* , and easy embedding was its primary design constraint. It also has tail-call elimination, coroutines, closures, and so on; semantically, it's very much like Scheme with a vaguely Python-like syntax.

* The language design favors hooks (called "metatables") for adding features to the core over adding features directly, to keep it small and flexible. You can build a prototype or class-based OO system in less than a page of relatively simple code. (See _Programming in Lua_, ch. 16: http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html ) Or delay/force, map/fold/filter, etc.

It's also written in pure ANSI C, which means porting it is trivial.

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