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I was just going to post about this. In Graham's early essay on succinct languages, he asks, "Are there languages that force you to write code in a way that is crabbed and incomprehensible?"

Factor feels incomprehensible until you learn to hold the stack in your head. The result is you eliminate all the intermediate variables in a program, which makes the language extremely succinct. All that's left are function calls and control-flow, which you can't remove anyway.

I believe the key to succinctness is (1) minimal boilerplate, (2) higher-order functions and (3) reducing intermediate variables. Functional languages achieve (3) with function composition. But Factor (and Forth et al) goes way beyond what functional languages can do.

Anyway, I'm having lots of fun with Factor.

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