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.

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[Veritian]

This guy is good at what he does. I know him. Factor is my favorite language. Don't talk trash about a language before writing any code in it. Factor's mathematical power is solid, with seamless bignums and complex values built in without libraries.

[snashik]

Interesting..kinda like FORTH on steroids

[b43xoit]

How different from Joy?

[stevedekorte]

Not sure why Slava says Smalltalk can't add a method at runtime without recompiling existing methods. IIRC, it can. But like Objective-C, changing ivars can require a recompile.

[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.

[emptist]

Fakto estos esperanta lingvo :)

[jsakltk]

no way, jose

[valberm]

estas tre sprita en la komenco: "saluton, cxiuj!" Kaj oni vidas preskaux neniun!!

It's so funny at the beginning. The guy says: "hello, everybody" and you can see almost nobody in the audience!!