Factor: an extensible interactive language

Google Tech Talks
October 27, 2008

ABSTRACT

Factor is a general-purpose programming language which has been in development for a little over five years and is influenced by Forth, Lisp, and Smalltalk. Factor takes the best ideas from Forth -- simplicity, succinct code, emphasis on interactive testing, meta-programming -- and brings modern high-level language features such as garbage collection, object orientation, and functional programming familiar to users of languages such as Python and JavaScript. Recognizing that no programming language is an island, Factor is portable, ships with a full-featured standard library, deploys stand-alone binaries, and interoperates with C and Objective-C.

In this talk, I will give the rationale for Factor's creation, present an overview of the language, and show how Factor can be used to solve real-world problems with a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I will emphasize Factor's extensible syntax, meta-programming and reflection capabilities, and show that these features, which are unheard of in the world of mainstream programming languages, make programs easier to write, more robust, and fun.

Speaker: Slava Pestov
Slava was born in the former USSR and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 7. He moved to Ottawa, Canada when he was 18 to study for a Bachelors and Masters degree in Mathematics. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. An early adopter of Java, Slava wrote the popular jEdit text editor, then went on to design and implement the Factor programming language. At his day job he hacks on web apps, optimizing compilers, garbage collectors, and everything in between.

• Category

  People & Blogs

[Satyajit Nashikkar]

Interesting..kinda like FORTH on steroids

[leimy2k]

Haskell doesn't *really* have this problem. Classes are groupings of functions, and you can later make things instances of those classes by defining functions of that class for your new object.

I don't see a major advantage yet to factor, but the Forthiness is neat.

[thatmartolguy]

"Metacircularity" is a horrible word to use for self-compilation or bootstrapping.

[Bjarke Ebert]

This is one of the most inspirational programming language talks I have ever watched!

[TheSidyoshi]

How about:

[ ... code here in forward polish notation ... ] reverse call

So for example I could write:

[ map [ 1 + ] [a,b] 1 10 ] reverse call

Which reads: map the plus one function onto the integers from one to ten. At school we learn to read left-to-right. The computer can read either way, it doesn't care.

Of course you could write it better, and make it traverse down all quotations. Isn't this more readable?

[TheSidyoshi]

This is pretty amazing!

[b43xoit]

How different from Joy?

[Tia1ko]

"Classes are groupings of functions"

Is this properly called "function", or is it rather a more abstract, uhm, "operation"? (Isn't there a special term for this stuff in CT, anyway?)

[Tia1ko]

@valberm: Right now I can see at the lower right corner of the video: "20 032 views" ;-)

[johnmair]

what he said about ruby (@ 45 mins) is only true of block parameters, not true of variables defined within the block/lambda in general. Further this was acknowledged as a 'bug' and is fixed in the most recent version of ruby.