5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay?
(not a criticism, just a question)
(not a criticism, just a question)
John Benediktsson has been leading the project since then, and as the post mentions, there are and have been many other contributors, but I think it's fair to say that the project lost a lot of momentum when Slava stepped down.
Joe Groff, who was another important early contributor, and who is now part of the Swift team at Apple, gave a talk that included an interesting critical retrospective on the factor project (or at least one chapter of it). I'm sure there was a better formatted version of it at some point, but this is all I could find:
https://github.com/jckarter/zissou/blob/master/talk-notes.tx...
See "bad parts" for the criticisms.
Incidentally, these notes were the first place that I learned of the Julia language.
0.93 was released April 16, 2010.
0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months).
0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits).
0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits).
0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits).
The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm.
A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.
Keep the faith, the world needs more powerful, offbeat languages!
Factor came to my attention during the 0.94 release in 2010, which was solid enough to learn Factor in a great IDE. I wish that I'd had more time to invest more seriously over the years, but am extremely glad that it's still being actively worked on. You can tell this from the Factor github commit log[2].
As far as I'm aware, since the community is rather small, most people that code in Factor don't bother much with the release numbers and just compile their images straight from github as commits are made. The "releases" are done more as a public milestone.
[1] http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-availa...