4 ms·

5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay? (n

5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay? (not a criticism, just a question)

otoburb 12y ago
0.96 was released April 20, 2013[1] and was rather solid to use. Glad to hear that it received a fair amount of hype before (I wasn't aware of that myself -- perhaps I missed that phase). Most languages seem to release rapidly as 'low-hanging fruit' features are worked on, and then seem to plateau as major releases get longer and longer in between. Factor came to my attention during the 0.94 release in 2010, which was solid enough to learn Factor in a great IDE. I wish that I'd had more time to invest more seriously over the years, but am extremely glad that it's still being actively worked on. You can tell this from the Factor github commit log[2]. As far as I'm aware, since the community is rather small, most people that code in Factor don't bother much with the release numbers and just compile their images straight from github as commits are made. The "releases" are done more as a public milestone. [1] http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-available.html http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-availa... [2] https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master
mrjbq7 12y ago
The releases have varied over the years from less than a year, to almost two years between "releases". For some historical context: 0.93 was released April 16, 2010. 0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months). 0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits). 0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits). 0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits). The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm. A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.
- colomon 12y ago
  Eh, the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation has been doing monthly releases since before 2010, and I don't get the impression that's done much to convince doubters. (Despite amazing progress since 2010.) Those of us working on developing it mostly grab the latest source from github and work from that, much the same as you guys. Keep the faith, the world needs more powerful, offbeat languages!
jwmerrill 12y ago
Factor has always been developed by a relatively small team, which makes their achievements even more remarkable. The language's creator, Slava Pestov, was a very important driving force in its development until around 2011, when he stepped down from leading the project to focus on a new job at Google. John Benediktsson has been leading the project since then, and as the post mentions, there are and have been many other contributors, but I think it's fair to say that the project lost a lot of momentum when Slava stepped down. Joe Groff, who was another important early contributor, and who is now part of the Swift team at Apple, gave a talk that included an interesting critical retrospective on the factor project (or at least one chapter of it). I'm sure there was a better formatted version of it at some point, but this is all I could find: https://github.com/jckarter/zissou/blob/master/talk-notes.txt https://github.com/jckarter/zissou/blob/master/talk-notes.tx... See "bad parts" for the criticisms. Incidentally, these notes were the first place that I learned of the Julia language.
- Dewie 12y ago
  As can be seen from his Github account, he also seems to have been the primary developer on the Clay programming language.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

5 or 6 years ago the language got a good amount of hype and was progressing rapidly. It's been a long time since 0.96. Why has there been such a long delay? (not a criticism, just a question)

otoburb 12y ago

0.96 was released April 20, 2013[1] and was rather solid to use. Glad to hear that it received a fair amount of hype before (I wasn't aware of that myself -- perhaps I missed that phase). Most languages seem to release rapidly as 'low-hanging fruit' features are worked on, and then seem to plateau as major releases get longer and longer in between. Factor came to my attention during the 0.94 release in 2010, which was solid enough to learn Factor in a great IDE. I wish that I'd had more time to invest more seriously over the years, but am extremely glad that it's still being actively worked on. You can tell this from the Factor github commit log[2]. As far as I'm aware, since the community is rather small, most people that code in Factor don't bother much with the release numbers and just compile their images straight from github as commits are made. The "releases" are done more as a public milestone. [1] http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-available.html http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2013/04/factor-0-96-now-availa... [2] https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/commits/master

mrjbq7 12y ago

The releases have varied over the years from less than a year, to almost two years between "releases". For some historical context: 0.93 was released April 16, 2010. 0.94 was released September 18, 2010 (+5 months). 0.95 was released August 16, 2012 (+23 months, 2500 commits). 0.96 was released April 20, 2013 (+9 months, 1100 commits). 0.97 was released November 1, 2014 (+19 months, 1400 commits). The core developers (I am one) generally use the latest development version which, except for some changes to the build farm a few months ago, is made available as tested nightly builds from our build farm. A partial reason for the delayed release was waiting for sufficient changes to "justify" a release (a bit of a soft qualitative delay, especially as we kept working on some new features). Going to a time-based release schedule might be nice, something to think about anyway.

colomon 12y ago
Eh, the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation has been doing monthly releases since before 2010, and I don't get the impression that's done much to convince doubters. (Despite amazing progress since 2010.) Those of us working on developing it mostly grab the latest source from github and work from that, much the same as you guys. Keep the faith, the world needs more powerful, offbeat languages!

jwmerrill 12y ago

Factor has always been developed by a relatively small team, which makes their achievements even more remarkable. The language's creator, Slava Pestov, was a very important driving force in its development until around 2011, when he stepped down from leading the project to focus on a new job at Google. John Benediktsson has been leading the project since then, and as the post mentions, there are and have been many other contributors, but I think it's fair to say that the project lost a lot of momentum when Slava stepped down. Joe Groff, who was another important early contributor, and who is now part of the Swift team at Apple, gave a talk that included an interesting critical retrospective on the factor project (or at least one chapter of it). I'm sure there was a better formatted version of it at some point, but this is all I could find: https://github.com/jckarter/zissou/blob/master/talk-notes.txt https://github.com/jckarter/zissou/blob/master/talk-notes.tx... See "bad parts" for the criticisms. Incidentally, these notes were the first place that I learned of the Julia language.

Dewie 12y ago
As can be seen from his Github account, he also seems to have been the primary developer on the Clay programming language.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]