
Io language - swah
http://iolanguage.com/
======
sivers
At the RubyConf in 2003, I asked Matz (the creator of Ruby) what languages he
was impressed with these days.

He said only one: Io

~~~
SamReidHughes
I guess that shows how much taste he has, then.

~~~
strmpnk
Well, he also mentioned that he'd recommend people look at Io, Haskell, and
some others IIRC. But Derek's question was a separate instance.

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szany
I cannot get over how beautiful that site design is.

~~~
draegtun
Yes I also find it very aesthetically pleasing. And it's also very functional
as well. For eg, see the search on the Reference page:
<http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/reference/index.html>

Steve Dekorte, the creator of Io, also uses same site design on his on
website/blog: <http://dekorte.com/>

~~~
werpon
Not to mention the tutorial, which is a work of art: succint, clear,
informative and easy to follow (for a programmer anyway).

<http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoTutorial.html>

------
farrel
Io is not very fast, even slower than Ruby.

~~~
kunley
I wonder why this is downvoted.

Io is beautiful, elegant and slow. The fact that it's slow doesn't mean it's
not worth learning or even using in production. Commenter could have put it in
other words, well he didn't, but downvoters: you will not change the fact that
it's slow by giving -1.

Do we have an era of wishful-thinking driven comment voting?

~~~
bufo
Depending on what you want to do, Io can be really fast. It has SIMD support
built in so for some structures it can be faster than unoptimized C.

~~~
kunley
That's what I didn't know, relying on my previous encounters and specific
tests. Thank you for pointing this!

~~~
draegtun
And here is a blog post which shows that a 200 times increase in speed is
possible when using SIMD:
[http://www.iolanguage.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=92](http://www.iolanguage.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=92)

------
mtogo
Wait, seriously? We're getting to the point of submitting decade-old
programming languages (that i'd bet 99% of programmers on here are aware of)
as news, without even some kind of news related to them!? Cmon, at least write
up a short blog post or a tweet or something.

------
scythe
<http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Io>

Everything is better with code samples! One of the FizzBuzz implementations is
particularly cool:

    
    
        for (n, 1, 100,
            fb := list (
                if (n % 3 == 0, "Fizz"),
                if (n % 5 == 0, "Buzz")) select (isTrue)
    
            if (fb isEmpty, n, fb join) println
        )

~~~
draegtun
Blush! I contributed that bit of Io FizzBuzz to Rosettacode :)

I originally posted that here on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1539295>

------
iambot
Seems to me that there are tonnes of new languages being developed all over
the place, I wish they'd have a short list of intended uses/features... but
not just all the features, rather the ones that are the selling point, why
should I investigate this language further.

~~~
riffraff
while I second your feeling, Io is at least 8 years old, so not so new :)

~~~
iambot
yeah I wasn't aware that Io was as old as it is, which makes my rash judgment
all the more rash, but I still feel that way about many of the (relatively)
new languages mentioned on HN every now and then

------
jamesbritt
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750830>

I don't get the "link to some long-existing home page with no comment" thing,
but that's what voting/flagging is for.

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minikomi
What a satisfying language to read. I hooe it gains more traction.

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umurgdk
and there is Ioke (<http://ioke.org/>) programming language. its not currently
developing i think.he implement io (and some plus points) on jvm. I really
like io's design, prototype based++, clean syntax, dynamic, macros...

------
gren
it's down

~~~
walrus
IIRC, Steve, the designer of the langauge, hosts the site on his home
connection.

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cageface
Definitely not interested in another dynamically typed language, no matter how
elegant.

~~~
hassy
Io is worth learning just to see what a clean prototype-based language feels
like. It'll probably improve your understanding of Javascript.

~~~
netghost
I wish JavaScript's prototypal features were more like io's, or even Lua's. io
was the first language I had seen where I really grocked prototypal
inheritance.

~~~
protomyth
I miss NewtonScript for its version of prototype inheritance, but was never
fond of the syntax.

