OTUG October 21, 2008 Meeting

Abstract - Factor (http://factorcode.org) 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. 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.

Biography - Slava is 24 year old. Born in the former USSR, he left the country at the age of 7 and lived in New Zealand, Australia and Canada; he got a Masters in Mathematics at the University of Ottawa. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Slava wrote the popular jEdit text editor and spent 7 years maintaining it, then went on to design and implement the Factor programming language. At his day job he hacks on web apps, optimizing compilers, user interfaces, garbage collectors, and everything in between.