Python vs. Io

[Paul Prescod]

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> Io (www.iolanguage.com) is a new programming language that's purely
> object-oriented (but with prototypes), has a powerful concurrency
> mechanism via actors, and uses an extremely  flexible syntax because
> all code is a modifiable message tree.

I long to live in a world where Python is considered a crufty incumbent 
legacy language that is forced on unwilling programmers by Pointy Haired 
Bosses. First, it would mean that Python has vanquished languages that 
programmers like less. Second, it would mean that the up-and-coming 
languages are so unbelievably cool and elegant that they make Python 
look like a lumbering dinosaur.

Thanks for reminding me that that that day was once unfathomably far in 
the future and now seems almost around the corner!

But when I look closer at IO it seems to me that the day is not as near 
as I hope. If you wish to hasten I urge you to:

  * finish the IO tutorial
  * distribute windows binaries of IO
  * make IO compilers to C and Java available
  * make bindings to popular windowing toolkits
  * make bindings to Java, .NET, COM, SOAP, XML-RPC etc.
  * use IO in a production context so that the rest of us can have faith 
in its stability
  * implement MySQL and Oracle bindings
  * publish some books on IO
  * point me to some documentation on how to launch and kill processes in IO

If this were all done tomorrow I might be tempted to jump over to IO but 
I would be amazed if it were all done even two years from now.

Also, an observation: IO's syntactic simplicity looks to me to be both a 
blessing and a curse.

  Paul Prescod