The Io Language

The Io language is a very simple & elegant homoiconic language. It was introduced as one of the seven languages in the '7 Languages in 7 Weeks' book. It's basically influenced by Lisp and Self, Smalltalk.

Two of the best Io-related blog posts by _why:

* Io Has a Very Clean Mirror - https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasA...

* Lazy Bricks, Lazy Mortar - https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hackety.org/2008/01/10/lazyBr...

And some code examples:

* Making an Account object - https://github.com/IoLanguage/io/blob/master/samples/misc/Ac... * Bottles of Beer - https://github.com/IoLanguage/io/blob/master/samples/misc/Bo...

Just discovering the language with this post. I'm must say I'm impressed by the syntax. I've read part of the documentation and understand every code example just by reading it, which is sufficiently rare to be mentioned.

I'm thinking to give it a try as a scrpiting language but find it too bad it seems no longer maintained. Code has not changed since 2 years.

To note, there is a pure Go implementation of Io[1] which is actively worked on.

[1] https://github.com/zephyrtronium/iolang

I learned about the Io language from working through the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book, as I suppose most people did. In the book, it was suggested that you should take a look at the example problems on the Io website. At some point, those example problems disappeared.

I made a backup of those example problems here: https://gist.github.com/jezen/7972975

Some 2 years ago Io got a new way of defining setters, which allowed for implementing destructuring bind ([a,b,c] := someTriple). It took me the better part of a year, but it was very rewarding. I put a write-up on my blog, which might be of interest if you'd like to know more about Io interpreter internals:

https://klibert.pl/posts/adding_destructuring_bind_to_io.htm...

Two threads from 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605310

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867575

(Links for the curious. Reposts are fine after a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Io seems to be abandoned. Is anyone using it?

Io has been around for a long time, indeed. I thought it was great, writing an Io interpreter in C was a lot easier than almost anything else, so for learning language internals, it is awesome, and I'd even say a great companion to LISP, to play around with how different first principles affect programming -- something that is obscured in mainstream languages, making it harder to learn how the guts work.

My graduation final project was done in Io more than a decade ago.

The language is generally great but it needed some financial muscle on the implementation side as every language do, this stuff is hard.

Why?

The more I program, the less do I value any of these overly dynamic features and elegant aesthetics.

However, I have come to greatly value robust tooling surrounding a language, to the point where I believe designing a language that makes the creation of such tooling difficult (or impossible) is a terrible trade-off.