[HN Gopher] Factor: A Practical Stack Language
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       Factor: A Practical Stack Language
        
       Author : slondr
       Score  : 92 points
       Date   : 2022-07-24 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (factorcode.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (factorcode.org)
        
       | bjoli wrote:
       | Be careful. Factor is a gateway to lower level stack based
       | languages.
       | 
       | I saw Zed Shaw do a presentation using factor and decided to
       | spend a weekend playing with it. It was the start of a two year
       | journey that ended with me writing forth for microcontrollers.
       | That was time I should have studied but was somehow always
       | sidelined by other things.
        
         | adastra22 wrote:
         | Oh the flip side, if you told that story in an interview I'd
         | hire you on the spot.
        
         | crest wrote:
         | Have you found #forth-hardware-projects and #mecrisp?
        
           | fmakunbound wrote:
           | There's also a pretty active Forth channel on Discord
        
         | mncharity wrote:
         | Imagine being able to say "I feel concatenative this afternoon"
         | and easily find active interesting efforts to contribute to for
         | a few hours, solo or pair or team. Dreams for the newborn
         | github included support for let's-meetup-and-hack _realtime_
         | dynamic community formation, but I 've not yet seen the like.
         | 
         | I enjoyed Factor. Fixed stack-effect seemed a nice trade of
         | flexibility for less oops.
         | 
         | I'd love to see someone start concatenative, but with a
         | replace-the-world focus. So move quickly up-scale to single and
         | multiple dispatch PICs, tabled WAM, clone V8 internals, link
         | Z3, etc, etc. "If you're not able to implement other languages
         | in bulk, and better than they are, you're still wedged". Sort
         | of a LispMachine for an age where a much broader-than-cons
         | foundation is possible/appropriate.
        
         | butterisgood wrote:
         | I too have been "nerd sniped" by factor before... it's quite
         | cool.
        
         | jasone wrote:
         | Hah, you could have done worse. The double-dose introduction to
         | stack-based programming via HP calculators and Adobe PostScript
         | in the 90s led me to spend on the order of 3000 hours
         | developing Onyx (https://github.com/canonware/onyx), which
         | started off as a PostScript clone minus graphics, and ended up
         | a thing of its own.
         | 
         | On the bright side, I learned a tremendous amount about lexing,
         | interpreters, exceptions, tail-call optimization, data
         | structures, garbage collection, etc., which opened up lots of
         | possibilities in later projects. With the benefit of hard
         | experience I would never recommend using a stack-based language
         | for a large project, but as a learning tool it has some nice
         | qualities.
        
       | mncharity wrote:
       | In case anyone else was curious, Slava Pestov is now at Apple
       | working on Swift. Top of his twitter[1] is a WWDC22 talk "Design
       | protocol interfaces in Swift"[2] (but video seems 1x-only - I
       | don't see a copy on yt - there's a transcript).
       | 
       | [1] https://twitter.com/slava_pestov [2]
       | https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/110353/
        
       | dharmatech wrote:
       | You can read HN in the Factor listener:
       | 
       | https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2020/04/18/fun-factor-libraries.ht...
        
       | dharmatech wrote:
       | Chris Double's posts on Factor:
       | 
       | https://bluishcoder.co.nz/tags/factor/index.html
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related (others?):
       | 
       |  _Factor: A Practical Stack Languge_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053857 - Jan 2020 (21
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor: An impressive stack-based language environment_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17726634 - Aug 2018 (34
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _A Panoramic Tour of Factor (2015)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377847 - March 2016 (6
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor - A Practical Stack Language_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141410 - Aug 2015 (7
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor - A practical stack language_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008472 - Feb 2015 (41
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _A panoramic tour of Factor_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750720 - Dec 2014 (10
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor 0.97 now available_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548832 - Nov 2014 (18
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Web scraping with Factor_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628055 - April 2014 (24
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor 's Visual REPL_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673792 - Sept 2010 (8
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor programming language (modern Forth)_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1623697 - Aug 2010 (19
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor: Comparing Factor 's performance against V8, LuaJIT and
       | SBCL_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388540 - May 2010
       | (2 comments)
       | 
       |  _Replacing GNU assembler with Factor code_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076658 - Jan 2010 (5
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Improved write barriers in Factor 's garbage collector_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=884704 - Oct 2009 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _A survey of domain-specific languages in Factor_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854757 - Oct 2009 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Performance in Factor, Java, and Clojure_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797378 - Sept 2009 (16
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor programming language_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782531 - Aug 2009 (5
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Joy in Factor_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772603 -
       | Aug 2009 (13 comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor compiler improvements_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738124 - Aug 2009 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Factor 's implementation of polymorphic inline caching_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629357 - May 2009 (9
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor VM ported to C++_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600668 - May 2009 (10
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Proof-of-concept Smalltalk implemented using Factor as a host
       | VM_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541836 - April 2009 (3
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Factor: A practical stack language_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=279356 - Aug 2008 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Factor 0.88 released_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664 - March 2007 (2
       | comments)
        
         | thethought wrote:
         | I wanted to reply like what is below but got cold feet. But
         | thanks.
         | 
         | >>>> Why? tedious for me w/o a join. Or is there a feature
         | lurking somewhere? At a different level stuff like this it
         | strike me as "... nothing to see here move on .. "
        
         | macintux wrote:
         | Could probably add any number of discussions of concatenative
         | programming, most notably "Why Concatenative Programming
         | Matters".
         | 
         | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20Concatenative%20Programm...
        
       | dmix wrote:
       | Those examples look really weird and cool.
       | 
       | This web app is using XML for it's views:
       | https://github.com/factor/factor/blob/master/extra/webapps/w...
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)