On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Michael Clagett <[email protected]>wrote:
> That brings a cost, however, as I've seen up to this point. It
> distributes responsibility for documenting behavior across a community that
> like most communiteis is uneven in its fulfillment of responsibility. The
> greater the dependency on "just read the code to figure out what's going
> on", the greater the barrier to entry to newcomers. I have talked to more
> than one such person who has come to take a look and turned away for this
> very reason. The power and flexibility is tremendous, no question. But
> power and flexibility aren't always the only thing you need.
>
This is definitely a problem, and a similar problem afflicts most languages
that rely heavily on metaprogramming, such as Lisps and even C++. The
common substrate is too thin, and different users' code looks too different
to easily read or interoperate with. Factor at least benefits from having a
relatively small community and a well-centralized code base, so when we do
promote idioms and libraries to the core language it's easier for us to
propagate those benefits across all the bundled code. That said, being a
small community, we also lack the free hands to keep the documentation
polished and accessible to newcomers a lot of the time.
> But wouldn't it be nice to have a platform that offers the power and
> flexibility of Factor that also plays nicely with OSes and other runtime
> environments?
>
I think Factor goes much further than most languages of its kind in
integrating with the host platform. Unlike Smalltalks, the canonical source
code isn't hidden in the image, and you can use your own text editor. More
OS features have bindings and bundled high-level APIs than your typical
Lisp or Scheme. The UI doesn't pretend to be a desktop in and of itself
(though granted, it still uses goofy non-native widgets). Deployed programs
aren't tens of megabytes in size. What do you feel is lacking in this
regard? Maybe I misunderstand your notion of integrating.
-Joe
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