Factor is a concatenative, stack-based programming language with high-level features including dynamic types, extensible syntax, macros, and garbage collection. It has a full-featured library, supports many different platforms, is fully com…
In response to a blog post about Stack Complexity in Factor, I figured I would add one way that I structure programs when possible. Suppose you want to make a server that runs sql queries where a route name is a filename. Some requirements
We survived covid and we’re foolishly gearing up for WW3. What a great time to be a Factor blogger! I got a job doing cmake and build systems in 2016 and since 2017 I’ve been doing JS/python/React/SOLR. I’m still working on Factor, so there…
I happened across a random tweet from Jesse Noller about free hosting on Rackspace Cloud for open source projects back in July and immediately requested an account for Factor. It took me awhile, but I just finished moving most of our servic…
I’ve been submitting bug reports and feature requests to the scikit-learn project, a great machine learning library for python. Andreas Mueller just wrote a one-hot, or one-of-k, encoder for transforming labelled features into binary featur…
In Factor, the old code-is-data adage is true and can be used to our advantage when writing runtime tools. Code is stored in what we call a quotation, which is just a sequence of functions (words) and data literals and can be called at runt…
In this blog post I’ll demonstrate a few of ways to fill a file with zeros in Factor. The goal is to write a some number of bytes to file in the least amount of time and using only a small amount of RAM; writing a large file should not fail…
Factor has had a calendar library for several years now. While it’s great for converting timestamps to human-readable formats, calculating holidays, and finding the number of days between two dates, it’s the wrong concept to use for timing
Some thirty seconds into play-testing Joe Groff’s terrain demo game, I realized there were no NPCs, no double-barreled shotguns or hand-cannons, and most disturbingly, no other players. Sure you can fly around, but you can’t gib your friend…
A new contributor, Tim Wawrzynczak, wrote an ID3 parser as his first Factor program a couple of months back. The code looked pretty good, so it was easy to refactor the way ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags are represented and to add some utility words
In my previous post I wrote about the file-info and file-system-info words. Using those words, it’s possible to write a portable program for directory listing (dir or ls) and one for file-systems listing (df). Uses for directory listing inc…
Factor’s sorting has been extended to support sorting tuples by multiple slots, one after the other. In a music player application, you may wish to sort your songs first by artist, then by album, then track number. If you had a tuple repres…