I spent a couple of weeks getting into Factor in 2022 and it was the most fun I’ve had programming, probably ever. Language itself aside, the dev environment and process of writing Factor is just delightful.

You had me at scryfall: https://docs.factorcode.org/content/vocab-scryfall.html

For other folks interested in what a Concenative language is:

https://www.concatenative.org/wiki/view/Concatenative%20lang...

Interesting!

Had no idea it was in active development! I spent a weekend with Factor about two years ago and it was enlightening.

Factor is a concatenative, stack-based programming language with high-level features including dynamic types, extensible syntax, macros, and garbage collection. On a practical side, Factor has a full-featured library, supports many different platforms, and has been extensively documented.

I remember first seeing Factor more than a decade ago (maybe even when it just launched, if memory serves correctly). It's really neat to see it thriving.

Factor is one of those projects that stands as a huge challenge to other conventional languages and their runtimes (or it would if anyone took it seriously that way.) The compactness and power, the "bang for the buck" is staggering.

Was curious what slava pestov was doing, he's at Apple on the Swift team (low surprise :)

https://factorcode.org/slava/

Factor is a lot of fun. I have a dream of one day building an OS from a Forth bootloader all the way up to a highlevel language. Do wish it had a more expressive type system though.

Would it be feasible to build a larger application using a language like Factor? I have no experience with concatenative programming, and it seems interesting, but I also get the feeling that larger systems would become rather complex and hard to read.

There is a glitch in the web page because the macOS link doesn't provide any package to download.

The problem is that the announcement page goes to [1] where it should go to [2] (a simple issue using os=macosx instead of os=macos)

brew install --cask factor also works

[1] https://builds.factorcode.org/release?os=macosx&cpu=x86.64

[2] https://builds.factorcode.org/release?os=macos&cpu=x86.64

I like that even though the website design has changed, the OS/CPU download table still looks exactly as I remember it from 2010 ;)

Clicking around the website for the past 30 minutes has left me way more confused about what this is than when I started. I get the feeling that it would take me at least two weeks to figure out how to make a todo list app in this language.

This is like Joy, but for non-PhD's.