

Ioke is a folding language - brudgers
https://ioke.org/

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mattnewport
I don't know what "folding" is supposed to mean in this context and it's not
defined elsewhere on the page. Is there a common usage of the term when
describing a programming language that I'm not familiar with? I first thought
of a functional fold but that doesn't appear to be the intended meaning here.

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hellbanner
From wikipedia:

In functional programming, fold – also known variously as reduce, accumulate,
aggregate, compress, or inject – refers to a family of higher-order functions
that analyze a recursive data structure and through use of a given combining
operation, recombine the results of recursively processing its constituent
parts, building up a return value. Typically, a fold is presented with a
combining function, a top node of a data structure, and possibly some default
values to be used under certain conditions. The fold then proceeds to combine
elements of the data structure's hierarchy, using the function in a systematic
way.

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hellbanner
I was trying to help out those asking about what Fold is. I guess it doesn't
show well if the Wikipedia explanation is confusing!

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brudgers
The definition of folding in Wikipedia is not relevant to Ola Bini's usage of
the term.

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hellbanner
Thanks. I misunderstood both of them.

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fhdhcdhedh
I don't get it. The page mentions what goals ioke is trying to achieve, but
then offers no meaningful demonstration whatsoever of the language's
compelling features. I'm left with the impression that "it's good because I
say so."

I'm really intrigued, but I don't even know what I'm looking at. The language
guide didn't help either.

~~~
beagle3
I haven't looked at it recently, but a couple of years ago, the idea seemed to
be (explicitly) "I'm willing to give up run time to reduce program length and
coding time", but (implicitly) without straying far from Ruby+IO.

The "what's different" examples back at the time showed a few Ioke programs
that were half the length of the equivalent Java and Ruby ones and running at
5 times as slow; Coming from an APL/K/J background, I was unimpressed by this
tradeoff.

Have no idea if things are different with Ioke today, and not enough time to
look at it again right now, sadly.

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moondowner
Important:
[https://github.com/olabini/ioke/issues/9](https://github.com/olabini/ioke/issues/9)

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swah
The name is due to Steve Dekorte's
[http://iolanguage.org/](http://iolanguage.org/)

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davelnewton
Ola kind of ran out of time--as stated back when it started, it was an
experiment. I was pretty excited by its expressiveness.

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brudgers
A podcast interview with Ola Bini discussing Ioke:

[http://www.se-radio.net/2010/01/episode-154-ola-bini-on-
ioke...](http://www.se-radio.net/2010/01/episode-154-ola-bini-on-ioke/)

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agumonkey
Oh, work by Ola Bini, I remember him for his contributions to JRuby.
Interesting experiment.

~~~
swah
Circa 2010

