Last night (April 2, 2009) at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge I gave a 45-minute talk on the Factor programming language. I’ve uploaded the handout and example code here. I apologize in advance to anyone in the Factor community who reads it and laughs at my “newbie” mistakes and misstatements.
Appistry again provided space and pizza – thanks guys! (Appistry is our locally-grown but widely-known cloud infrastructure software maker – they’d been cloudy for years before the term entered wide use.)
The talk appeared to go over well. There were many important things about factor that I’d love to talk about but didn’t have time. Nonetheless, I think 45 minutes is a good talk length, and I think the format (short talks) is a key part to the Lambda Lounge’s success so far.
Speaking of the Lambda Lounge, next month there is a “language shootout” – if you want to participate, be sure to join the mailing list and look over the participants. (You need to join the list, to be able to get to the wiki with that page.) I might submit an entry myself, using Factor or another language.
I still have your git handout from the JUG presentation back in the fall, and I’ve used it on more than one occasion 🙂
The presentation was really good. (As Kyle’s always are.) I had looked at Factor a bit previously, and mostly wrote it off as another Forth. But Kyle’s presentation got me somewhat excited about it. There are some really nice features in there. And while some of the concepts are significantly different than other languages, the number of concepts is exceedingly small. (Especially when contrasted with Perl 6, which was the other topic of the evening.) But the small number of concepts prove to be a very powerful combination — very elegant.
I think my favorite part of the language is that data flows forward.
Enjoyed the talk! I’m going to keep the no-slides technique in mind, I think it worked out (surprisingly?) well.