Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Day 1: Skipping School, Hanging Out

Meeting Io is like meeting any language. You’ll have to put in a little keyboard time to get properly acquainted. It will be much easier if we can interact outside of stifled conversations in the hallway before history class. Let’s cut school and skip straight to the good stuff.

Names are sometimes deceiving, but you can tell a lot from Io. It’s simultaneously reckless (ever try Googling for Io?)^[6] and brilliant. You get only two letters, both vowels. The language’s syntax is simple and low-level, like the name. Io syntax simply chains messages together, with each message returning an object and each message taking optional parameters in parentheses. In Io, everything is a message that returns another receiver. ...