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Io's an attempt to combine the language minimalism of Smalltalk and Lisp. So you get a message-passing object oriented language with Lisp-like features like pro

Io's an attempt to combine the language minimalism of Smalltalk and Lisp. So you get a message-passing object oriented language with Lisp-like features like programs being their own parse tree, which you can manipulate at will at runtime. Apparently it's supposed to be really fast, too, for a pure-interpreted language, but unfortunately the name 'io' is unsearchable and I haven't found any references. (I think this is a major factor why nobody's ever heard of it.)

JadeNB 12y ago
> unfortunately the name 'io' is unsearchable As with Go, appending 'lang' gives more luck: https://google.com/search?&q=iolang https://google.com/search?&q=iolang. (I still didn't find a reference for the speed, though.)
- dognotdog 12y ago
  Io's speed has improved a lot historically, but due to its dynamic nature, it has a relatively high dispatch overhead, and little of what remains can be optimized away. In the past, GC was a big bottleneck, not sure where we are today on that front. Io is no speed deamon, but for heavy computation, its easy to dip into compiled C or C++ libs, putting it in the same ballpark as an unjitted ruby, python, or lua.