Potion

By Hans Nowak · July 2, 2009 at 4:08 am · Tags:

Potion, a short pamphlet. Potion is a new language experiment by _why (known from The Poignant Guide to Ruby, among other things).

I love stuff like this… but then again, I have a thing for obscure and unusual languages. Some ultra-quick impressions:

  • So far, it looks minimalistic and flexible.
  • Borrows more than a little bit from Io. (Not that that is a bad thing…)
  • Not sure I like the “licks”, but I will withhold my judgement until I know the language better. You’d think that in a language as dynamic as this, special syntax would not be necessary… but as the article points out, there may be problems with that.
  • Apparently “monkey patching” is allowed, much like Ruby and Io. Dangerous…
  • Interestingly, variable names can contain arbitrary UTF-8 characters. I can think of a few problems with this. On the other hand, it seems refreshing to be able to break out of the tired (letters, digits, underscore) set of choices.

I tried to build and install Potion before on OS X, but ran into some issues… will need to try again sometime.

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