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Ioke Tries To Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby
synodinos writes "Ola Bini, a core JRuby developer and author of the book Practical JRuby on Rails Projects, has been developing a new language for the JVM called Ioke. This strongly typed, extremely dynamic, prototype-based, object-oriented language aims to give developers the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax."
Ola Bini has no beard. The only proof you need that this language will fail?
People think that s-expressions are a poor syntax. These people are wrong.
Seriously, if you give yourself the change to wrap your head around it, s-expressions are both elegant and powerful. Representing your code as a data structure is what makes lisp lisp. Take that away, and you might as well just use ML.
New languages are announced every week or so in different places... it doesn't change the fact that the language that most big projects rely on now is one of the old guard. C is, despite it's incarnations (or deformations, depending on who you believe) still king, and it was designed in 1972.
Another pocket language with idiosyncratic design choices that seem just right to the understimulated nerd looking for fame.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The idea of these new languages (Python, Java, Ruby, and presumably ioke) is to abstract very common functions to increase the speed of development.
Every layer of abstraction increases the "power" of the language from a development point of view, allowing developers to do far more than they could with a single line of code, trading off flexibility, and performance.
The idea of a new language is to deliver as much "quick access" functionality as possible (saving the developer having to implement their own low level functionality such as string classes, array handling and perhaps memory management) while compromising as little as possible on flexibility and performance.
If ioke delivers a best-yet mix of these trade offs, then it stands a chance to become the Next Big Thing. Personally, I think that Python is the state of the art when it comes to highly functional development languages that still deliver good performance and flexibility. It's not quite fast enough to write an operating system in (although there was an effort called Unununium which tried but never took off), however it is vastly superior, both in overall design and performance, to other languages that provide a similar level of abstraction such as PHP.
I hate printers.
Not one single soul in the world who was ever going to make a language, is now not going to, because of that rant.
the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax
So, it's Lisp then?
Seriously... in terms of small regular syntaxes you don't get smaller and more regular than Lisp:
(source).
Next smallest and most regular syntax for a useful language is probably smalltalk, but that's too long to post here. It's worth noting that smalltalk (particularly its first-class statement blocks) was a heavy influence on ruby. Smalltalk also gets close to hitting the 'nice' requirement, which IMO Lisp is a long way from.
[Python]'s not quite fast enough to write an operating system in (although there was an effort called Unununium which tried but never took off)
Unununium's kernel was, I believe, written in C. The user interface, userspace applications and drivers would have all been written in Python.
Unununium didn't take off because its developers had no clue about OS design. They apparently spent most of their time boasting about how their operating system didn't have a kernel (it did; its kernel was a slightly modified Python interpreter[1]) and how it was such an innovative design (when all it did was replicate some of the achievements of traditional language-based systems that were popular in the academic research community in the 70s and early 80s, cf. Smalltalk-80, which although now generally considered just as a language was originally considered by its developers and users as an operating system, or the earlier CMU Hydra system which was built around similar principles), and not enough time actually writing the damned thing.
[1]: The issue seems to be one of understanding what a kernel is. The unununium developers seemed to believe the defining factor of a kernel is that it provides inter-process protection by allocating different memory spaces to the different processes. Under this view, many modern OSs don't have kernels, including Singularity and JX. Also, some older ones, including 16-bit Windows and Amiga.
Yes, people often don't see the point of things they've never tried, or of features that are missing from their current favourite language.
We already have a programming language with a simple syntax and the strengths of Lisp and Ruby. It's called Lisp.
Badass Resumes
C is likely to remain strong until we just have more CPU power than [...]
We already do (have more than C can handle[1]): dual and quad core processors.
There is as of now no really good parallel (or multi-threaded) language. Java and Erlang are perhaps the best, which essentially says where we stand right now.
Please do not talk about Posix thread libraries, they do tell enough about the memory model. Java was the first language to define one, but it is not 100% clear. C++ is just about to define one for itself[2].
Therefore for example D is not the next language.
[1] Not that you said or even implied that.
[2] http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/
Lisp did fairly well in the areas where the problems it solved particularly well were common; C and friends did well where the things it dealt with well were the main challenges. when C was conquering the world, the latter were more common than the former. Increasingly, the problems Lisp deals with well have become relevant to more software, but C-based languages are pretty entrenched (both in systems and in programmer's minds), so instead of Lisp seeing a resurgence, you see C-like languages with more and more Lisp-like features bolted on. (The same is true with "Smalltalk" in place of "Lisp", too.)