As a number of stack/concatenative language posts I’ve made today have made it to the front page, I thought it appropriate to submit the factor programming language which, if you are looking to get starting with a language in the Forth family is imo, your best modern option.
For anyone (like me) asking “Is Factor even still a thing?”, they had a release today. :)
http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2014/11/factor-097-now-available.html
Which includes a rewritten Redis client I contributed. Factor is actually surprisingly great for web development.
Key word being surprising? :) I saw you’d done something, wondered what it was. Very nice.
I’d love to see some “real world” examples of Factor. I’ve played with it a few times but never bothered to expend the effort for fluency.
Would a semi-toy example that allowed you to search an offline Gmail cache via Elasticsearch and a website count? I gave a talk on doing all of that in Python recently; it’d be really easy to translate it to Factor, and demonstrates a lot of components (HTTP client, JSON parsing and generation, email parsing, simple web sites, etc.).
Yes, that’d be great!
Unfortunately there aren’t many good learning resources for Factor. There’s the built-in documentation and a small tutorial, but for advanced features, you’re on your own.
I’ve written a small blog post (that is outdated now because of the Twitter API changes) which is hopefully helpful for first steps: http://yfl.bahmanm.com/Members/Gertm/posts/factor-example-program
And there’s a post on adding Factor support to Textadept by Michael Richter: http://yfl.bahmanm.com/Members/ttmrichter/yfl-blog/adding-textadept-support-to-factor