Recently, _why wrote about a fairly unknown language called Io. He talked about some of the amazing inference features in Io. (Well… Really just the Call object. But that single object puts Io well beyond most languages with regards to reflecting on itself.) Io’s website has a brief list of where its main features came from. However, I’ve been telling people that it works like a combination of Javascript (protoype-based object system) and Lisp (macros). In fact, however, Lisp and Javascript already have a lot in common, so it really just reminds me of Lisp with syntax.

Getting to the point, however. I like Io. Also, it has become my tradition lately to write a little web server in languages that I’m learning as a sort of first project. (Theres a few reasons for this. Namely, it gets into text processing, using external libraries, i/o, system calls, etc… Practical things.) So, I started doing this as normal with Io… however I ended up going a bit further.

So… Introducing the first alpha release of Iota, my tiny Io application framework. Along with Brio, an application server written in Io that plays nicely with Iota.

A few notes. First, I’m a complete newb to Io. So, if anyone out there who is more familiar with Io would like to tear it apart and stomp on the coding style, I’d appreciate it. Secondly, I tried to write Iota in a pragmatic fashion, with a small blog application as my model. So, the features it has may be tied a bit too closely to that model. This will change in time. Lastly, there are currently no tests. There is one simple reason for this: I did it for fun, and I don’t find tests to be fun. This should, and probably will, be rectified before I convert this blog over to Iota.