Concatenative Programming

Hey that's me! No, not the amazing Factor dev that authored this post. No, not the contributor who jumped in and saved the day. I'm the

one of the members of the Factor Discord server

who complained about numbers! Woohoo!

This was just reposted on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/ffjpdh/theory_concatenative_combinators

Parsing!

Discussion on lobsters

Main link

I don't have the OS to play with this, but it looks fun!

From Wikipedia:

Prograph is a visual, object-oriented, dataflow, multiparadigm programming language that uses iconic symbols to represent actions to be taken on data. Commercial Prograph software development environments such as Prograph Classic and Prograph CPX were available for the Apple Macintosh and Windows platforms for many years but were eventually withdrawn from the market in the late 1990s. Support for the Prograph language on macOS has recently reappeared with the release of the Marten software development environment.

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I think pipeline-oriented tooling is relevant enough for this community (is this thing on?).

A PRQL query is a linear pipeline of transformations

It compiles to plain SQL, but queries generally start with a table.

Each line of the query is a transformation of the previous line’s result. This makes it easy to read, and simple to write.

PRQL consists of a curated set of orthogonal transformations, which are combined together to form a pipeline. That makes it easy to compose and extend queries. The language also benefits from modern features, such syntax for dates, ranges and f-strings as well as functions, type checking and better null handling.

link

• youtube
• hacker news
• slides
• code
• blog/blurb/page

I'm adding it to the sidebar under practice.

I was alerted to it via this nice blog post with a solution in Factor.

I'll put up at least a few Factor solutions of my own at a tiny repo, and am happy to answer any questions or take any advice about them.

Here's another link to the challenges

Discussion on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/akit0v/fxyt_tiny_stack_based_postfix_canvas

Discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38671377

...

Factor ... scales horribly both with respect to lines of code per word (function) and the amount of local state (number of variables). This is because local state is manipulated on a stack which you have to keep track of in your head. ...

So instead you're constantly having to come up with neat composable abstractions to fold up the state. This is the sort of thing that makes code elegant, loosely coupled and small in any language. ...

...

Discussion on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/e9q09f/tal_is_programming_language_for_uxn

It's just about time! Huzzah!

I'll collect links and resources here:

• Advent of Code itself
• Advent of Code community here on programming.dev
• Factor solutions for years past, on the concatenative wiki

I'll probably only last the first few days, optimistically a week, but plan on submitting my solutions in Factor to the AoC community, and I'll link any of those here in the comments.

Discussion on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/8doqmk/meow5_concatenative_assembly

Discussion on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/w78tgy/om_programming_language