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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?
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.
My eye sight must be getting bad... I misread this as:
Joke Tries to Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby
We already have a programming language with a simple syntax and the strengths of Lisp and Ruby. It's called Lisp.
Badass Resumes