Slashdot Log In
Ioke Tries To Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Nov 10, 2008 01:22 AM
from the like-a-sibilant-jewel dept.
from the like-a-sibilant-jewel dept.
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."
Related Stories
Submission: Ioke: Combing the best of Lisp and Ruby by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Try Io (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.iolanguage.com/ [iolanguage.com]
Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
Re:Try Io (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] is, despite it's incarnations (or deformations, depending on who you believe) still king, and it was designed in 1972.
Parent
Re:Try Io (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Try Io (Score:5, Insightful)
[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.
Parent
Logic compression (Score:3, Interesting)
You can express any program with an infinite list of "IF THEN"s, but that's not very useful (and way too much typing).
So that's where programming languages come in. Not all compression algorithms are great for all sorts of data and situations, similarly not all programming languages are good at all things. Of course there are some compression algorithms which are just plain crap
A language that's p
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Right on - I think the importance of Javadoc being an official part of the language as opposed to some add on is often underestimated when people wonder why Java caught on so well, and the fact that most IDEs integrate Javadocs so seamlessly is extremely helpful. I've still never seen another language that has such a practical and actually used documentation system.
When your IDE is s
Re: (Score:2)
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.
That's why I like D. It's basically C with modern concepts built (elegantly) into the core language. No need to get all crazy with things like Ruby, etc. Plus it's compiled. :)
Re: (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
That's because C deals with how computers actually think. All this new stuff with languages is wonderful, and often has some uses in various cases, however none of it relates to how a computer actually works. C is a good "mid level" language. By that I mean it does a good job of structuring programs in terms of how they actually work on a processor, while still being fairly easy for a human to work with.
A lot of people get caught up in their "flavour of the month" language and forget that none of this relates to how computers actually work. For example yes, pointers are confusing and you can get in to trouble with them. However, that is actually how a processor handles things. It has registers that are pointers to memory locations of things it needs (like a pointer to the instruction to execute). So while more restrictive, managed references might be nice, they've nothing at all to do with how the processor works. That means you have to implement additional code overhead to deal with that sort of thing, and that you are losing the ability to optimise in certain ways.
Basically C is likely to remain strong until we just have more CPU power and memory than we know what to do with on all platforms (embedded included). Until then there is the need to generate optimised programs. To do that, you need to be able to write a program based on how the computer thinks, not on how you do.
Parent
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
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/ [hp.com]
Parent
Re:Try Io (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I might be convinced if it weren't for two things:
"Best"? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, please. There's a macro for this:
Re:"Best"? (Score:4, Informative)
underscores? in lisp? are you mad!!?
(best-part-exists-p lisp)
i.e., hyphens as separators, p for predicate rather than the schemish question mark of you parent, and no need to quote lisp which is clearly being treated as a variable pointing to a language entity here, not a raw symbol in need of quotation.
Parent
Re:"Best"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The parentheses just disappear after you've coded Lisp for a while. Also, try paredit.el [mumble.net] 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 [wikipedia.org] dispatch solution.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Have you had your eyes checked recently? ;)
If you cannot see *that* many brackets then something is horribly wrong.
Re:"Best"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dylan had a very powerful macro system.
http://www.opendylan.org/ [opendylan.org]
with all the advantages of a late-bound language.
Parent
Per-function optimization (Score:2)
It seems to me that per-function optimization settings would be useful in very few real-world cases.
Re:Per-function optimization (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Best"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As it is, Lisp faces real problems in garbage collection and system resource management, or at least it has traditionally faced such problems.
You are confusing reputation with reality.
LISP was the first language that required garbage collection, and that radical idea was fought tooth-and-nail by the rest of academia and industry. But the garbage collection technology developed was fast and reliable (I knew many of the people intimately involved in making the GC for Scheme at MIT). There was certainly an o
Re: (Score:2)
Also, it's :-)
(best-part-p 'lisp)
you insensitive clod.
Outlook negative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
However, he wears a hat AND has an "unhealthy" interest in programming languages. So maybe it will succeed after all.
Re:Outlook negative (Score:5, Funny)
No, no, you've got it backwards. Designing a successful language gives you a beard.
Poor Grace Hopper...
Parent
Yet another wannabe Lisp minus macros (Score:2, Insightful)
the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax
In other words, this is just a reinvented Ruby targeted to the JVM. Without macros, what's the point? Why not just stick with Common Lisp and get all the power of Lisp, not just some of it, and still have a "small, regular syntax"? You can even use ABCL [common-lisp.net] if you want to target the JVM.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
*sigh*
It would help if you actually read the rest of the article:
Prototype-based? I'll pass. (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't used Self, but going by my experience with Javascript, prototype-based languages suck compared to conventional class/metaclass based ones. The problem is that parents of types must be *instances* of their parent types, and there isn't always a suitable kind of instance to use as a prototype. Either you end up coding around the prototype system and emulating conventional constructors, or you end up specifying special uninitialized states for base classes.
Prototype languages make it easy to use the GoF prototype design pattern, true, but I find myself thinking "hrm, I need a new type" far more often than "Hrm, I need a prototype system for object initialization."
Also, Python and CLOS style metaclasses give you all the flexibility of a prototype system.
I'm all ears for any advantages the latter might have.
Re:Prototype-based? I'll pass. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Lisp Syntax (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lisp Syntax (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if you give yourself the change to wrap your head around it, s-expressions are both elegant and powerful.
Elegant and powerful? Sure. But Readable? No way.
I like S-Expressions as XML replacement a lot, since for representing simple structured data its quite nice. But it just doesn't lead to very readable code when it comes to programming, even after some years toying around with Scheme, I still find "a = 5 + b" a hell of a lot more readable then "(set! a (+ 5 b))". The first paints a visual picture with clear symbols, the other is just token soup, it might be easy to parse for a computer, but very definitvly not for a human. Array access and a lot of other basic stuff is just a total mess in s-expressions.
Parent
Oh boy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another pocket language with idiosyncratic design choices that seem just right to the understimulated nerd looking for fame.
Re:Oh boy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Clojure (Score:5, Informative)
All the goodies of lisp, the JVM, and functional programming without all the bad outdated stuff. It's a very cool language.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my opinion, those are the three projects that one has to look into for cool (if you're a PL geek) stuff that is nonetheless bordering on mainstream: Clojure, Scala, and F#. Last two in particular, as Scala seems to be the "future of Java" to many advanced Java programmers who got tired of language limitations, and F# is being made a first-class supported language for the next .NET and Visual Studio release.
Meanwhile, yet another my-own-programming-language-of-the-day is getting old. There are announce
Re:Clojure (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't recommend enough the screencasts by Rich Hickey [clojure.blip.tv], the language designer and main implementer.
The 5th screencast, Clojure Concurrency [blip.tv], 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Lost in a sea of (Score:3, Funny)
Oh great, you combine the white-space-tab problem with the Lost in a Sea of Parentheses problem to get lost in a sea of white space ;-P
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [unige.ch]).
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.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately that nice small regular syntax is only for the Lisp core. The actual language that you need to program in has all kinds of other syntactic features, starting with 'symbols and `(macro ,@quoting) and going rapidly downhill from there.
Parent
Joke? (Score:5, Funny)
My eye sight must be getting bad... I misread this as:
Joke Tries to Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby
This already exists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You mean, "Right, it's a joke." In some browsers, the bottom of the j is cut off. I invented a new language too, named asdlkj. It is whitespace [wikipedia.org] combined with brainf*ck [wikipedia.org] that sits atop the microsoft JVM that compiles down to executable php.
Here is some sample code (tabs in [tab]):
+ + + + +[tab]<[. -]-.[tab] [tab]>-- [tab]<.+.
I'm still trying to understand what it's supposed to do.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
I think it should be pronounced "joke", which seems to fit...
Re:Awesome another langauge (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I say we stop all development entirely!
Its likely in this cause being that its built on the JVM, that people should probably just use java anyway.
I'm not a Java expert, but... Java does everything that Ruby and LISP does without having to jump through hoops?