Factor – A practical stack language

Be careful. Factor is a gateway to lower level stack based languages. I saw Zed Shaw do a presentation using factor and decided to spend a weekend playing with it. It was the start of a two year journey that ended with me writing forth for microcontrollers. That was time I should have studied but was somehow always sidelined by other things.

I really love the power of Factor. It is probably the most powerful language I have ever come across. That being said, I think there needs to be a more interactive method where you can see things on the stack in real time as you are programming. I found myself not being able to focus on the problem I wanted to solve and instead was spending too much of my brainpower on remembering what was on the stack where. If…

As someone who built Forth compilers back in the day, I really like this language. There's a nice overview of Factor as a paper here: https://factorcode.org/slava/dls.pdf and a Google tech talk video of Slava Pestov (Factor's creator) showing off the language here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g

http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffactorcode.or... Good introduction to the language for beginners.