Ola Bini, one of the big guys behind JRuby, is developing a new programming language called: IOKE. It's influenced by lisp, smalltalk and ruby. Share your thoughts about this new dynamic programming language
A:
AFAIK this is just a one-man-show. It seems extremely unlikely that one person will be able to undertake all the work necessary to make a programming language popular, e.g. writing tools, libraries, etc.
So unless he can get a big company to back him and use his language or establish a community of IOKE developers, I would suggest his languages is doomed to failure, ho matter how performant/elegant it is.
On a more superficial level, I dislike the name IOKE, mostly because it's not at all obvious how it should be pronounced.
Don
2009-01-21 13:28:30
'e is svedish ya? ze language, is a ioke?
Kent Fredric
2009-01-21 13:40:21
JRuby has Sun's backing, so this'll probably get backed by them too. And Ruby was a 1 man show language. http://www.rubytips.org/2008/01/10/a-quick-dose-of-ruby-history/
Allain Lalonde
2009-01-21 14:56:49
One-man shows do not necessarily remain one-man shows. Most languages in use today can be traced to at most a few people, often just one. What you're saying is that the language is young, and that doesn't imply unsuccessful.
David Thornley
2009-01-21 15:55:35
"JRuby has Sun's backing, so this'll probably get backed by them too"I find it hard to believe that Sun will 'probably' back IOKE just because they've also backed a different language in which the creator of IOKE is involved.
Don
2009-01-22 17:49:26
Ioke has (to some extent) ThoughtWorks backing it. And, to be honest, it's waaaaaay too soon to say "Ioke has no community behind it". The language was released less than 2 months ago -- Ruby and Python took years before community was formed around them.
Carlos Villela
2009-02-06 00:01:05
How can it be "waaaaaay too soon" to make an assertion about the present tense i.e. "has no community behind it"?
Don
2009-02-06 05:50:06
I'm pretty sure all languages have to start small. Ioke now has many contributors, I hear. Clojure was a one man show as well, and look where it's gone.
Rayne
2010-02-10 04:46:44
A:
Seems interesting, but is currently just a proof of concept.
If you need something similar now, just take a look at IO language
Dev er dev
2009-01-21 15:34:27
A:
Ola is not just "one man". He's "one superman".
I found Ioke after looking at Io (and being a Ruby programmer of about five years). So far, I love the language. The core is very small, and quite intuitive. He's currently marrying Ioke with the JVM, but he's claimed that it wouldn't be too difficult to port it to JavaScript and throw it on V8 (if such a thing was desirable). I imagine he'll stick with the JVM, as this theoretically allows her to utilize other Java libs.
The documentation is clear and plentiful (a side-effect of using TDD which generate docs). The language model is clear enough to understand. Its macros are powerful. Its prototype-based object model is easy to understand.
As a language, I'm in love. I can't wait until he focuses on speed.
Mase
2009-02-06 05:24:27
+1
A:
Ioke is quite an interesting language to play with to create DSLs. I find the simplistic syntax (everything, even control flow, is a message) that can be expanded interesting. Macro support in Ioke is great (retrieve parts of message before they are evaluated [or 'activated']).
Ioke is obviously still a very young project, but very promising.
Thinking about it further, I am a bit conflicted regarding the simplistic syntax as I'm still hoping for a tad more syntactic sugar -- for example for control blocks which are more expressive IMHO when using special syntax -- rather than being pure messages that must be implemented with the same bracketed syntax as any other message.
I guess this is a matter of taste -- do you keep the language definition simple and 'pure' or do you 'taint' it with more syntax and make it a bit more expressive?
Redbeard
2009-06-09 03:48:54