I've mentioned a couple of times that I started reading through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, and even though I've recently been heavily sidetracked by Learning Go I just finished chapter two which dealt with Io.

The book gushes over the language, and I've read a lot of other people's blogs where they seem quite excited about it. In the end I couldn't finish the last exercise, even having a working example to go off. It was just a bit too painful trying to find the right object context, navigate around the strange method syntax and other oddities in the language. Of course, it would be wrong to blame the language, so I'm just going to leave it saying that Io didn't resonate with me.

Interestingly, even though I haven't used a great deal of Javascript I wasn't too bothered by the prototyping paradigm of the language. The main confusion (aside from general syntax) was the control you had over in whose context the method arguments would be evaluated - the sender's or the target's. It took a bit of playing around to figure out which was the correct alternative in all instances.

For now, I'm conquered. Maybe I'll come back to that exercise and solve it, but probably not. On to Prolog, which I did get into briefly around 2001 (with fairly awful results). Hopefully the experience will be better this time.