Ioke is a folding language

Here is the definition the creator has.

https://ioke.org/wiki/index.php/Guide#Introduction

I imagine they are trying to create something that could take the roles of both low-level and high-level, like C++ and Lua in a gaming engine.

He talks about it in a blog post [1] and uses Steve Yegge's definition [2] of "code that writes code that writes code". Ioke is homoiconic and seems to contain fexprs (functions which allow you to pass it unevaluated code to be evaluated (or not) later, thus capturing dynamic scope), like Io, and unlike most modern lisps.

[1] https://olabini.com/blog/2009/01/a-folding-language/ [2] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/wizard-school.html

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.

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.

Circa 2010