World: r3wp

this is maybe the good start: http://docs.factorcode.org/..

yes, I don't know about low level things... maybe it can give you 
some ideas..

Thanks. I had heard of Factor, but not seen it.

it's a forth + lisp + haskell sort of language .. it's stack and 
image based

kib2: yes .. both are interesting ... I had a bunch of concrete reasons 
to switch.. basically I didn't want to, but all the indicators were 
in favor of rebol for what I need (I intend to write a blogpost about 
it .. because it's too long to explain here)

The particular binding order effect that matters in REBOL is that 
"outer" and "inner" scopes are faked with the binding order. Any 
attempts to revise the "inherited" contexts that the code is supposed 
to have, after the code has started running, is unpredictable at 
best and crashworthy at worst - a bad idea in any case. This means 
that if you want to import words from other modules into your code, 
you should do it *before* your code starts running. This means import 
headers, not import funcctions.

Janko: what were you missing exactly ?

I don't have a good view into what "binding" is at rebol yet .. I 
imagine a little

kib2 : nothing was really missing in factor ... I live from my coding 
so I have to choose the tools where I think I will fasters with least 
problems and best solve what I need... this was a web-app that needed 
to run on desktop to (so all apache+ XX + mysql) fell of and it gave 
me a reason to make it with factor.

but as I said, it's complicated a little ... I can copy paste you 
the text I wrote to dockimbel when I was explaining him how I started 
with cheyenne few weeks back..

>>>basically I tried cheyenne and rebol for web-apps just by accident 
... one saturday I was ready to work on that project in factor whole 
day and then some hard bug in factor server prevented me from working, 
so because I was in a working mode I started playing with doing some 
other simple idea in ruby on rails (I haven't tried it yet before 
- I don't like frameworks in general) .. after I hit some magic of 
RoR I stopped and then tried cheyenne RSP .. and I made a basis of 
a working app in that afternoon ..  when I tested and saw it also 
performs I was hooked..<<<

in short: Factor is very interesting language but I was amazed at 
how productive I was with rebol + rsp, I need PDF: factor has some 
deprecated bindings to c lib for generating pdf-s, rebol has a dialect 
for that, I need to run in on a desktop standalone: factor can run 
standalone but is more heavyweight, cheyenne server starts and shows 
icon in tray "before I even click it" , I need a tray icon too for 
my app, I found example of it already and it works, in factor something 
like this doesn't exist yet ..

and bottom line is the language , rebol nicely scales al the vay 
from newbie (imagine VB coder) up to advanced user with introspection 
code is data and all , factor is a little more scarry to start with

Janko: the pdf and postscript dialects in Rebol have impressed me 
a lot. Maybe it's possible to build something like LaTeX in Rebol.

I haven't yet digged geep into them , I just looked to see if they 
work .. but yes, they are very nice way to make pdf-s :)

Janko: I'm not a Factor expert (I started studying it 3 weeks ago). 
But the Factor learning curve is certainly higher than Rebol's one! 
Sometimes I have hard times remembering what's on my stack when I 
try to write non-trivial words.

( + if I will need gui for desktop server, rebol has lighweight software 
rendered gui, factor also has a gui but on windows it's opengl based 
which is not really practical for a gui.. even casual games on windows 
try to use DX7 renderer for maximum compatibitily and avoid opengl 
beacause of driver issues)

yes.. factor is whole another beast..

I prefer Cat, but Factor is cool too.

I haven't really decided, I go from totally loving the concatenativeness 
(the stack) for some very elegant solutions to hating for sometimes 
not seeing what is going on in even simple stuff

isn't cat made for .NET?

Janko: Cat is build on C# ?

The first implementation was, yes, but the language has nothing .NET-specific 
in it. There's many implementations.

aha, I don't like the .NET based stuff really .. if I had to choose 
I would much prever JVM based ones.. just personal preference

Like I said, many implementations. The lead author is currently making 
a new version written in C++.

Factor has very reactive/alive comunity... they make bindings to 
a lot of stuff quickly thats why I prefer it.. they have everything 
from web-server/web framework to opengl stuff, etc

google talk video from slava pestov is very interesting and shows 
you factor in an hour

we need powerfull binding layer too, or we stay rather isolated ...

None of these concatenative languages are practical for direct use, 
but some make good compiler targets. This is why the semantics of 
the language are more important than implementation details. Cat's 
strong typing wins out there.

aha, cat has strong typing .. I didn't know

The original implementation also runs on Mono if you are a purist.

BrianH: tWhy do you think concatenative langs cannot be used for 
pratical projects?

BrianH: well you clearly know tons more about languages than me, 
I know them only more from "user perspective"

I am not a purist , but if I see something .NET / Mono .. I am not 
that interested, but I see now that it has many implementaitons yes

Kib2, the model is too weird for most people to make work well, and 
the benefits don't outweigh the weirdness (unlike Erlang).

As for Cat, I was not as interested in any existing implementation 
as I was in the language semantics. I figured that I would make my 
own implementation if I wanted to use it.

(just btw.. factor is compiled, slava also posted a lot of info about 
how he compiles and optimizes the code etc ..  this is his talk I 
mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0QlhYlS8g)

The author's blog posts about language semantics are more useful 
than the language itself, as with other concatenative langs.

I was talking about Cat there, but the same applies to Factor.

Concatenative techniques are good to apply to stack-based VM instruction 
models. User-level stack languages are best left to device driver 
writing, not app programming.

BrianH: there're not weird; people have to think differently from 
what they know (C,Python,Lisp, Haskell,etc.), and I can see some 
benefits : shorter code, CLOS system (in Factor).

I've found Erlang's syntax really weird compared to ie Haskell.

I hope you realize that every time someone says "people have to think 
differently" that excludes the vast majority of programmers.

People *don't* have to think differently, and most *can't*. This 
also applies to REBOL, I'm afraid :(

BrianH: in this case, don't call them programmers. A programmer is 
curious, and likes to think differently by nature!

Wouldn't that be nice? There is too much work to limit "programming" 
to such rare people.

:)

Talk to professional Java or Oracle developers and then see if you 
can claim programmers are curious :(

Or the VB crowd *shudder*

They're only curious about what libs could be added to their 150MB 
machine gun.