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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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