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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."
The parentheses just disappear after you've coded Lisp for a while. Also, try paredit.el for Emacs. With that turned on, you don't edit text, but sexps. It's wonderful, once you get used to it.
As for Lisp itself, well, 20 years ago did for the first time many of the things that mainstream languages today are just beginning to obtain, like closures, arbitrary lexical scoping, highly dynamic data structures, and (in Scheme's case) call/cc. One thing gcc just implemented is per-function compiler optimization settings. Common Lisp has had a facility for that since the beginning of time.
One thing that still isn't matched by other languages, however, is Lisp's macro system. It's far more powerful than C macros. You can define new control structures, implement sub-languages, and construct any higher-language construct you want. And these features you build all look just like native language constructs.
And don't even get me started o CLOS, which is one of the very few object-oriented systems to provide a clean multimethod dispatch solution.
I haven't used Self, but going by my experience with Javascript, prototype-based languages suck compared to conventional class/metaclass based ones.
Generally true. Javascript was never intended for writing large programs. The object system is basically a hack on top of dictionaries. That's easy to implement, but doesn't scale well.
This is one of the classic things one can do wrong in language design, and which tend to have to be fixed in later versions, painfully. Some other classic boners are leaving out a "bool" type (C and Python), not providing generics in a statically typed object-oriented language (C++ and Java), and not designing in separate compilation (ISO Pascal).
Ioke is cute, but there's just no really good reason for such a strange syntax, and it's going to turn too many people off. Using whitespace as an operator (really!) is probably a bad idea. The ability to change the operator precedence dynamically may be "fun", but does not lead to readable or maintainable code. Experience with "read macros" in LISP indicates that rewriting code during input isn't good for readability either. On top of all this, Ioke allows regular expressions in code, like Perl. (It's not clear from the description if you can use regular expressions in the read macros to rewrite the regular expressions in the code. I think you can.) So Ioke brings together the least readable features from four different languages.
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
Dylan had a very powerful macro system.
http://www.opendylan.org/
with all the advantages of a late-bound language.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
There is a lot of buzz around Scala and F#, and considering the limitations they lift from the more conventional mainstream languages it's understandable. But I think Clojure transcends both these languages and many other new on-top-of-another-platform languages because it doesn't just take the latest trendy language features and mix them with new syntactic sugar. It has a very well thought design that feels very right, elegant, and powerful.
I can't recommend enough the screencasts by Rich Hickey, the language designer and main implementer.
The 5th screencast, Clojure Concurrency, is most recommended by me for programming language aficionados. It's a long overview of the language and its philosophy regarding concurrency programming. After I saw that one, I was very excited about Clojure in a way that none of the latest languages made me feel.