I had a note from Giancarlo Niccolai bring me up-to-date on Falcon which has now reached version 0.9.2
Falcon is a multi-paradigm language – not yet as multiply gifted as Oz, but on its way.
The plans for Falcon from here to 1.0 are very ambitious: like Io, it is a language to keep an eye on. Are you coming with?
Any google for Mozart or Claire or Cecil Diesel is a reminder of what is in a name. And the Flash Apollo crew at Adobe know that ActionScript ain’t, well, Self.
But in the case of Io, the language, which fonts so often render up as “lo”, and given that a google considers ‘I/o’ to match ‘Io’, could we not consider, say, Aula.
As in, voila, our Aula.
It almost means lobby! And it will appeal to some Europeans.
And I can stop with the “io, the language”.
It is not too late. Transmuter is now trans, B became C; oak became, well, you know…
Now to find someone to suggest this to Steve Dekorte … 
Aula, as in the lobby where we might welcome newcomers …
Latin: aulikus (outer courtyard of a home),
Greek aule (entrance to a dwelling)
Of course you want to keep the ‘a’ on the end, so as not to associate a ‘hall’ with DLL’s … or are we defeated by ready associations with ‘awl’ ‘all’ and ‘awful’, the latter having lost all connotation of gaping amazement, awe.
And as a rule, the Mercury folks say, ‘Abandon io, aula ye who enter herein’ – but it’s just one ante-chamber leading into another, one courtyard enclosing another … so not very functional, afterall …
The reason a German University has an Aula is that it is a highly modular place, very much extended into unlikely buildings.
And you have never heard a guest say “Well, the lobby is very nice, but where is the hotel?”
We’ll tell neophytes that it is actually pronounced “Aye-you-`lah” with the last syllable accented. And tell tyros it’s named for the Eule of Minerva. Just like AJAZ.
“Io, io … it’s off to objectland we go … with an acronym here, and a label there, Io, io, io, io …”
Io. Iterable objects.
Lo. Lobby’o'objects.
Aula. Latin. Means yer not home yet, but there may be light enough to search for the key you lost along the way …
Could io, the language, hold promise for Strongtalk?
Given that there is no good frontend to Io ( io, the language ) it would seem that Strongtalk could be a user-friendly face for Io, which is already Smalltalk friendly in so many ways.
But there is also no good interface to Oz beyond Emacs … or no ? Could ST look to evolve in that direction?
One interesting option is to look at the backends for Mercury – Mercury is pure and has no i/o and so no useful GUI ( and since someone once said that Smalltalk developed without regard for Prolog … Mozart sees itself as a reaction to Mercury purists … but seems not to be as nice a fit for Strongtalk as Io.. The thing about Mercury and Oz is that they come from reacting to the commercial effort at adding types to Prolog ( Turbo Prolog aka PDC Visual Prolog which now has parametric polymorphism at pdc.dk ). Types for prolog was anathema to the prolog purists, performance be danged.
Of great interest to me, personally, is a marriage of XLClaire to Smalltalk/X ( WebClaire is already reaching out to offer Choco to java with Palm ).
I hope Strongtalk will appeal to those put off by Rebol and Curl having proprietary core – when I use either I immediately think of what could be done with Strongtalk …
