A language also needs to have a book about it. The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples.For years I have wanted to write that book about Io, and I believe now is the time to start. To stay motivated and solicit input from the community at large, I'm going to write the book as a serial in the form of blog posts, once a week every Saturday afternoon until I have enough to collect into an e-book. The chapters will not be posted in order; this is an interactive work and your comments will help direct where it goes.
Some of the posts on this blog will read like a philosophical manifesto, but I hope to balance practical Io programming advice in equal amounts. I believe that, like Unix, Io represents both a thing and a way of thinking.
Great initiative!
ReplyDeleteI discovered Io about a year ago, just after learning Smalltalk and I loved the idea behind Io. Unfortunately the docs were too sparse and I didn't felt confident enough to use it for anything else beyond hacking and having fun.
I'll follow your blog with attention (and maybe add something on the comments).
Good luck!
Thank you, raig!
ReplyDeleteOk, so I agree with the quote by Paul Graham on books being full of examples; so, can we have some examples that describe statements like "... all the guard rails are gone.", "... design patterns spring up to fill the gap", "... takes enough code that the calling code may also need to be abstracted"
ReplyDeleteAlso, one of the benefits of boilerplate code, rigid semantics and ceremony is that an IDE can do a lot of the thinking and checking for you. What techniques do you use to keep your Io code straight when it's not "loaded in memory".
When you say "corporate use" are you saying that Io couldn't be used corporately? If so, could you explain why? Do you think that Io wouldn't become boilerplated and templated in a corporation or even a large group?
I disagree with the statement "... never really allow to say anything as succinctly as you might like"[sic]; with OO and proper naming you can achieve the same succinctness as Io with only a few more tokens (e.g. parenthesis, semi-colon, etc.). Where in Io I can say "myObject myMessage", in Java/C* I can say "myObject.myMessage()". The code behind myObject and myMessage is the key. Complexity is complexity, if I have 2000 instructions for the computer I'm going to have 2000 statements whether I wrap them in a language framework, a third party framework or code them by hand. Maybe some examples here would help me (and possible others) understand what you mean.
Please understand that I'm not trying to disparage your blog or your book, I sincerely want more Io documentation and I applaud your efforts to fill the gap.
Also, Bruce Tate doesn' t have a full book on Io, but his chapter in "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" is what got me hooked on Io initially; Io itself did the rest.
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ReplyDeleteCan you please keep writing the book?? I love it, and Io desperately needs it.
ReplyDeleteThanks!