Re: Aikido language

["David Suárez de Lis" <address@hidden>]

Greetings, 

I have downloaded and compiled Aikido, and I have found it to be a very 
interesting language, precisely within the limits you yourself expose on the 
documentation, and very coherent with the goals it was intended to reach. 

I find particularly useful the weakly static "typing" (generic variables are 
like usual variables in other scripting languages, but the fact that a 
regular variable gets fixed to the type of the first value it's initiated 
with is very interesting, I guess it allows for some early checkings that 
may be interesting to do, even if Aikido is apparently the kind of 
bind-as-late-as-possible language, which is very useful as well for several 
kind of things). 

Another things I have found very interesting is the block inheritance and 
the extension ability, this feature reminds my of Ruby dynamic class 
extension, or even Javascript ability to make object prototypes vary/change 
in runtime, really useful and elegant, and the -> operator on streams. 

Just some questions: 

a) why is GTK+ mandatory? I'd say having GTK+ as an optional feature would 
be a sensible thing (lots of programming tasks don't need a gui) 

b) any plans of updating aikido with SQL and/or LDAP streams? Provided 
theses I could start using Aikido right away in my day-to-day job 
(experimentally, of course, but I am sure my customers would agree that it's 
easier to read than perl, even when we all love perl :-) 

c) when extending a function, is there any mechanism to signal where is the 
new code to be inserted, or it is simply appended to the original function 
body? I am asking this mostly because if a function returns, no added code 
will ever be executed, and being able to extend a function and add it a 
debugging print here or there, without the need to touch the original code, 
would make testing and debugging much easier... 

anyway, congrats for a fine language, with a great name :) 

best regards,
david