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35 comments

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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
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/

BasDirks
It's just off-balance, with all focus on "io". Talk about a beautiful name as well.
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.
bobbywilson0
At RubyConf 2009, the same question was asked he said 'Go'.
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?

stonemetal
(note: I didn't down vote it.) Io the current implementation is slow but as Ruby, Javascript, and python have shown one slow implementation doesn't make a language slow. From what I understand Io developed by one person in his spare time so enough interest from the community could fix any performance problems.
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.
scythe
>you will not change the fact that it's slow by giving -1.

...but you can change the fact that it's slow by contributing code to the interpreter! Actor-based concurrency and prototype objects can both be made fast, as has been proven by Erlang and Lua respectively. Exceptions are an unfeature but they can be easily avoided.

The slowness of Io should be seen as a programming challenge, not a problem. ^,~

cageface
Definitely not interested in another dynamically typed language, no matter how elegant.
troels
That's a rather ignorant statement to make.
cageface
That's a very presumptuous response. I'm very familiar with lisp, scheme, perl, python, php, ruby and javascript. After moving to scala last year I realized that I'm a lot more productive in a good statically typed language than I am in any of those.
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.
cageface
I was hacking Io at the C level years ago, and I understand prototype inheritance just fine. I'm far more interested in Scala and Haskell, thanks.
gren
it's down
walrus
IIRC, Steve, the designer of the langauge, hosts the site on his home connection.
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
    )
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...
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.
minikomi
What a satisfying language to read. I hooe it gains more traction.