I haven't looked at it recently, but a couple of years ago, the idea seemed to be (explicitly) "I'm willing to give up run time to reduce program length and coding time", but (implicitly) without straying far from Ruby+IO.

The "what's different" examples back at the time showed a few Ioke programs that were half the length of the equivalent Java and Ruby ones and running at 5 times as slow; Coming from an APL/K/J background, I was unimpressed by this tradeoff.

Have no idea if things are different with Ioke today, and not enough time to look at it again right now, sadly.