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Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g

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]:https://factorcode.org

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I used Factor a lot in the past. It's a great language. Some blog posts of mine on the subject: https://bluishcoder.co.nz/tags/factor/

And here's a quick screencast I put together that shows using the Factor GUI to drill down objects and source using the Gopher client as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sozwQ7QmOhs

I worked on a project in the early 90's that was written mostly in PostScript (NeWS) and Common Lisp - two languages that have rather more in common than you might think!

Edit: Wasn't so much just PostScript environment but the NeWS/HyperNeWS environment that made that graphical programming rather good fun...

People have described Forth as Lisp without the parentheses.

Definitely some interesting parallels.

I toy with the idea occasionally of writing a Lispish language (probably a whitespace lisp) that transforms itself down to a Forth/PostScript style engine for execution - one of many things on my ToDo list ;-)

Stack-based byte code machines for Lisps are not uncommon. Emacs Lisp has one, CLISP too, I think. It keeps the instructions small, since operand references are implicit.

I was more thinking about a runtime conversion from a Lisp style AST to RPN primitives rather than a more traditional compiling stuff down to a separate VM - but clearly not something I've thought through in that much detail!

You can have both! https://github.com/sctb/woe/blob/master/boot.w

Those people were horribly misinformed.

Sure, they're very different languages, but they nonetheless have a lot in common.

http://wiki.c2.com/?ForthVsLisp is quite an interesting read.

Can you name two languages that have little in common? Nothing in common?

Little in common? SQL and C. Prolog and JavaScript. Erlang and BASIC.

Interesting. What was the project about?

It was an EU ESPRIT 2 project to develop "Intelligent Training Systems" for complex industrial plants.

I worked in an academic partner - the team I worked in was mostly control engineers and mathematicians and I was the lone CS guy who got to actually build stuff.

Interesting fact: The day Slava Pestov gave his Techtalk, the next door Golang was presented. History might have taken another turn for Factor if Golang didn't slurped the audience on that day.

Hah! I don't think a stack-based language would have taken off regardless of who was in the room that day, to be honest.

It all worked out well anyway, I ended up joining Google a couple of years after that talk, and now I'm at Apple working on Swift. It's not as elegant as Factor but of course has a much bigger user base.

I had fun participating in the google codejam using factor, and in 2012 I wasn't the only one ! https://www.go-hero.net/jam/12/languages/Factor

Too bad that google codejam limited the available languages starting from 2018..

Factor is a very impressive engineering accomplishment, the standard library has so many useful algorithms and data structures implemented, and almost all of it with very clean APIs and documentation.

That website is very broken now sadly, and appears to only have records going up to 2017. I can't find 2018.

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