Hello Max! almost exactly two years ago, I asked Ian Piumarta from VPRI a similar question on the S3 (Self-Sustaining Systems) workshop in Potsdam, Germany: Aren't Forth and especially Factor interesting candidates for FONC? He definitely agreed, but admitted not having so much experience with stack-based or concatenative languages.
Today, two years later, I would say that Slava Pestov and his development team on Factor have convincingly demonstrated that stack-based and concatenative languages are the most promising candidates supporting the STEPS approach. Since I'm also doing research on concatenative languages, I might be biased. However, my argumentation is a bit different. For me, concatenative languages distill the techniques used for almost four decades in building the most complex systems mankind has ever built: telecommunication systems and the Internet. These kind of systems are message-based, scale extremely well, they are roboust, concise (see the TCP/IP example discussed elsewhere on this mailing list), flexible and extremely adaptable. That's why I'm a bit surprised that the VPRI teams does not seem to pay so much attention to Forth, Factor and related languages. Gruß, Dominikus 2010/5/9 Max OrHai <max.or...@gmail.com> > Hello all. > > I'm an undergraduate student (formerly CS, now math) and I've been > reading this list since the beginning of the STEPS project: this is > one of the most promising things I'm aware of going on in computing > right now. (I'm a big fan of Haskell's rising popularity, although > it's more of a case of gradual improvement, building on the traditions > of Lisp and ML etc..) Still, I'm puzzled how I've never seen anyone > here mention the "other" famously compact, dynamic, self-contained > system: Forth. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in stack > languages, mostly around Slava Pestov's Factor > (http://factorcode.org), which seems to me to share many themes with > the STEPS/FoNC work, although it's certainly more pragmatic in > orientation and less earth-shaking. Does anyone here have any > experience with Forth or Factor that they'd care to comment on? > > Here's a Google Tech Talks video of Pestov introducing Factor: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g > > - Max OrHai > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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