[Stackless] Io

Guy Hulbert gwhulbert at eol.ca
Sat Jun 14 11:55:23 CEST 2008


On Fri, 2008-13-06 at 19:45 -0700, Phoenix Sol wrote:
> I know that you are all very busy as always, but I would like to hear
> what you think about this language Io, if you ever have the chance to
> look into it.

I'm lurking here (I haven't even tried using stackless yet) because I am
very interested in something like Io.  I have a daughter who needs to
learn some programming this summer (starting Engineering at Uni in the
fall) and I am going to see what she can do with it.

She played with C for a few days 3 years ago and she's read some set
theory (halmos) and we've talked a little about URMs (cutland:
computability).  The faculty she's entering emphasizes C on Unix and the
courses she requires are very basic but I'm going to start her on python
so she doesn't get bored to quickly and have her translate some of the
programs to C afterwards (perhaps looking at swig).

If she gets far enough, I want her to look at translating smtpd.py into
Io.

So I've been looking fairly intensively at Io and I've pushed in on a
couple of people who do architectural-level work and who have a lot of
experience.  One of them really liked it (the other is very busy.

> 
> Missing from the 'bindings' section on the first page at
> http://iolanguage.com is Python, and while I'm actually kind of weary

I missed that.  Parrot seems to be making progress finally and depending
where it gets, that may be the way to go.  I wonder if anyone has looked
at a front end for Io on parrot ... that should be easy to check ...
dont see one (but they have URM for the latest version 0.6.2 :-)

http://www.parrotcode.org/languages/

>  of the performance hit of calling Python, and excited about how easy
> it is to add C extensions to Io, but not being a competent C

Swig.

>  programmer yet, it's nice to know I can fall back on Python libs to
> some extent.

Unfortunately, I'm still stuck thinking in perl.  I can write
semi-decent C when I need to but I am not in any sense a "C Programmer".

> 
> Anyway I really like it, but I want to find out what more educated
> programmers and or more experienced developers think about it ;-)

Alas I'm a sysadmin educated in applied math/nuclear fusion (tokamaks).
My wife has a masters in CS so we have (old) copies of Knuth etc lying
around the house.

> 
> -- 
> Phoenix Sol
> 541-646-8612
> 130 'A' Street,
> Suite 6
> Ashland, Oregon
> 97520 
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--gh






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