Re: [stack] Re: Joy noob checking in!

Duke Normandin <[email protected]> wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
>> If you want practical application or large/growing ecosystem, then yes.
>> Joy is all about getting the abstraction right.
> Not sure what you mean by "getting the abstraction right"?

I'm not sure. I'd have said that Joy is about starting to explore the
theory for the first time. I don't think Joy's been modified when "the
abstraction" turned out to be wrong. (Am I wrong?)

Factor's been modified many times when a better way was found to
express a given concept; many profound changes have been made that
affected much of the code of most applications (this was possible
because Factor's master repository includes many of the applications
written in it). Factor isn't at 1.0 yet, so these changes are still
possible -- but the last release included fairly minor changes, and it
had been a long time since the release before that; things are
becoming quite stable.

The purpose of those changes is to know by experiment whether a
proposed language change is actually a decent idea -- in order to be
officially released, it should actually improve most applications.

One extreme example of a language modification was when Factor
replaced 'dip' and stack shufflers (swap, rot, and so on) with the
combinators in the cleave/spread/apply family -- stack shuffling was
assumed to be essential to stack languages, but those combinators can
often make it unneeded.

> Duke

-Wm