If my personal opinion counts for anything: I think Slava is a first-rate compiler hacker working on a pet language. Somebody should snag him ASAP and put him in charge of something more useful; dunno, a tight compiler for an embedded ARM platform for mobiles or something.

The world didn't need "the best forth-dialect" which he created, and still doesn't. It just needs another standards compliant C compiler. Nvidia or Intel should put an end to his fun-mongering and suit that boy up for a nice Lead FOO Architect position :-)

Couldn't disagree more. The world already has enough von-Neumann-style languages and people working on them; we need to explore different ways.

"The world already has enough von-Neumann-style languages and people working on them"

I believe mahmud was being ironic.

Slava's very smart, but I think that the basic idea of a 'stack based language' is simply not a great one, because keeping track of the stack in your head is a pain in the ass. So I'd say that mahmud is right on. Worth learning for fun, but it just doesn't strike me as practical.

Good Factor is more about combinators than stack juggling.

I dunno, I kind of like the energy that he gives off, and stack-based languages are a nice complement to high-level languages such as lisp.

I would certainly find myself using factor in very small footprint systems rather than C or asm.

Seems like this is useful innovation, and there is not much innovation happening in the C language world, relatively speaking.

You're thinking of Forth, not Factor- Mr. Pestov seems to want to compete more with high level languages like Python than with C. Factor has garbage collection, and compiles to images [ a la smalltalk ], not really attributes that scream 'embedded' to me.

I like how you put [a la smalltalk] in square brackets, rather than in parentheses (a la lisp).

It would seem that is the case. The factor image is within a few percent of the sbcl lisp image. Nonetheless, the energy is contagious.