Factor: an extensible interactive language

I see what you did there. ps: just in case here's a very enjoyable talk, not about, but by Slava [VIDEO] Beautiful and impressive.

I recently came across a language called Factor that works very similar, if not identical, to this. Here's a video about it: [VIDEO]

I just stumbled across this Google Tech Talk on [factor][0] last night! It absolutely blew my mind. The engineering looks to be top notch, and the video is 9 years old to boot! [VIDEO] Anyway, really want to give Factor a try for some personal projects. Would love to hear anecdotes from people who futz with this stuff. [0]: [LINK]

As someone who built Forth compilers back in the day, I really like this language. There's a nice overview of Factor as a paper here: [LINK] and a Google tech talk video of Slava Pestov (Factor's creator) showing off the language here: [VIDEO]

There was always something I liked about Forth when I didn't have to do much stack-thinking. One of the things that felt forth-y to me when I first encountered it was threaded code in Clojure (or any other point-free kind of idiom for that matter). [LINK] I'll sometimes abuse Python's compose to do similar things I won't send out for code review. Maybe I really should just try to live in Coconut instead of silly stuff like: import chess import chess.svg from IPython.display import SVG, display from functools import reduce def rcompose(*fs): return reduce(lambda f, g: lambda *xs, **ys: g(f(*xs, **ys)), fs) inline_board = rcompose( chess.Board, chess.svg.board, SVG, display) Factor's quotations dealing with stack management weirdness is super nice, too. [LINK] It still has a bit more stack juggling than I like, though. That could just be a "me" problem. Props to that whole community for their effort. [VIDEO]

I agree. I remember his talk on Factor. I wish people gave enough support back then so he could work on it full-time. Here is his talk on Factor: [VIDEO] , back from 2008.

Your comment does not make much sense even if it is true. Factor (Forth-like language) implements even its own ":" (defines a word, i.e. a function) using the language itself, it is not builtin, same with "if", and so forth. Thus, "MEMO:" or locals[1] ("::") being implemented as a library does not mean it is a bad thing, on the contrary, in the case of Factor, it makes it quite powerful. The object system is entirely implemented in Factor, too. "Large chunks of functionality are not part of the core language, they are in just as library".[2] And to compare OCaml's type system to Python's is straight out absurd. [1] Locals are entirely implemented in Factor, too, which is only about ~500 lines of code. It is not part of the core language, and on top of that, there is no performance penalty whatsoever! [2] See more here: [VIDEO] .

It's funny because 3 dropped in 2008, the same year Slava was demonstrating Factor in google tech talks which was a contemporary language to python3 that completely blew Python out of the water. [VIDEO]