Galois Tech Talk: Slava Pestov on the Factor programming language
Don Stewart
the Factor language, environment, and implementation.
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Title: Factor: an extensible interactive language
Speaker: Slava Pestov
http://factorcode.org/
Date: **Thursday, Oct 30, 2008**
10.30am - 11.30am
Location: Galois, Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)
Portland, Oregon
Abstract:
Factor is a programming language which has been in development for a
little over 5 years. Factor is influenced by Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk.
Factor takes the best ideas from Forth -- simplicity, short, succint,
code, emphasis on interactive testing, and meta-programming. Factor also
brings modern high-level language features such as garbage collection,
object orientation and functional programming familiar to users of
languages such as Lisp, Smalltalk and Python. Finally, 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.
Biography:
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.
About the Galois Tech Talks:
Galois (http://galois.com) has been holding weekly technical
seminars for several years on topics from functional programming,
formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and
operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the
programming language and formal methods communities.
The talks are open and free. If you're planning to attend, dropping a
note to <do...@galois.com> is appreciated, but not required. If
you're interested in giving a talk, we're always looking for new
speakers.
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