Somvid - Factor: an extensible interactive language

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Factor: an extensible interactive language

Google Tech TalksOctober 27, 2008ABSTRACTFactor 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 PestovSlava 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.

Uploaded: October 29, 2008 at 12:07 am

Author: googletechtalks

Length: 01:36:39

Rating: 4.754386

Views: 16098

Tags: engedu talk education techtalk googletechtalks google techtalks talks

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Video Comments:

valberm (July 8, 2009 at 8:38 pm)

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!!

karmacop911 (May 25, 2009 at 1:44 am)

this looks like a beautiful language. i think i'm going to pick it up to create my custom game making tools that i've been wanting to make.

PriestBurn (April 15, 2009 at 9:04 pm)

now thats a pretty big number ... heeey

Veritian (April 3, 2009 at 2:02 am)

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.

DJgamer999 (February 14, 2009 at 8:57 pm)

how did you get the video to be over 10 min. long?

zyxrationalist (January 31, 2009 at 12:35 pm)

CloJure is way way advanced as a languageor may be this presentation was bad.When u talk about language keep the libraries away for atleast first half of the persentation.

snashik (January 25, 2009 at 4:59 am)

Interesting..kinda like FORTH on steroids

Disprofuse (January 10, 2009 at 11:50 am)

Can you explain that more? What talk?

bootiack (November 9, 2008 at 7:25 am)

I remember mccarthy put smak down on ruby by asking his commentator if it was neccesary to iterate each time to do xyz in ruby. Guy said yes. Mccarthy then said ruby is not where lisp was in 1960.

leimy2k (October 29, 2008 at 11:14 pm)

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.

cronin1024 (October 29, 2008 at 9:47 pm)

boa constructor... nice :)

nathanjohnyoungman (October 29, 2008 at 7:55 pm)

Thanks for the great overview of the Factor language. One thing, I should've clicked "watch in high quality" to make the editor screens more readable.Concerning scope and closures, Python 3.0 adds "nonlocal" and Ruby 1.9.x is adding block-level scoping.

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