17 Jan, 2010, Idealiad wrote in the 1st comment:
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So I sort of randomly found a link to Factor, which some describe as a modern Forth. It looked interesting and so I've been messing around with it. It's pretty fun. To quote the Factor folks, "Factor has been used for everything from scripting, web applications (see Furnace), games, and XML parsers".

My question to everyone is – how the hell would you write a game in a language like this that wouldn't melt your brain while writing it.

I just have no conception of how a stack-based language offers any benefits over an applicative language (i.e. C, Python, Java) for something game-oriented. Stack-based languages (to my untrained eye) seem more like a theoretical exercise for computer scientists.
17 Jan, 2010, Mudder wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I think you can find people to write things out of anything simply for the novelty of having done it.

Presenting exhibit A as an example of this.

A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE
17 Jan, 2010, JohnnyStarr wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Mudder said:
I think you can find people to write things out of anything simply for the novelty of having done it.

Presenting exhibit A as an example of this.

A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE


That is an example of an esoteric language, that is for the most part "fun" or "silly".
Factor seems to take a different approach to how the author communicates with the machine.
The syntax doesn't look too crazy, my question is what makes it "better", and in what implementations?
17 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
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Idealiad said:
My question to everyone is – how the hell would you write a game in a language like this that wouldn't melt your brain while writing it.

My question to you is – why the hell are you taking a screwdriver and trying to cut down trees with it.
Seriously though; not all programming languages are perfectly suited for all purposes. But assuming the language is so-called "Turing-complete" then you should be able to do anything with it, with some contortions at least.
Or maybe this language is teh awes0me and we just don't really know it because we don't usually think that way.

That said, their example code shows a Tetris implementation so have at it.

Some of their statements are a little misleading IMO. They say things like:
Their wiki on LTR evaluation said:
Unlike some languages such as C++ where every statement is a minefield of implicit function calls, and it is not always clear what order things are evaluated in, in a concatenative language, the debugger always just walks left to right.

Well, ok. Sure. But this is a property of C++, not necessarily of applicative languages. Other languages (like Java) define very strict ordering of parameter evaluation.


It mainly looks like it would be very useful for functional-like idioms as it makes things like function composition easy to express.
17 Jan, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 5th comment:
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Idealiad said:
My question to everyone is – how the hell would you write a game in a language like this that wouldn't melt your brain while writing it.


It's not all that different from MUF. You just have to unlearn the brain damage caused by C like languages. ;-)
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