Factor

A really interesting language is Factor. You might think of Factor as a variant of Forth, and in some ways it is. However, it's also an extremely well-built, featureful, and downright neat system.
fire engine control panel

The main author, Slava, has poured a tremendous amount of energy into this project, and the results show. Where many similar projects chug along as console-only systems, building on a single platform, and limited to simple console interaction, Factor provides a built-in GUI system (based on an OpenGL widget set), embedded help, searchable function reference, tutorials, and examples. If a language can be judged on its merits (rather than peer pressure), Factor sure seems to have a lot of things going for it.

Things I'm interested to find out:
  1. How well does it handle concurrency? (The key to the thousand's).
  2. Does it scale?
  3. Does it have a cool mascot?
I have created my own Icon for my Mac so I don't have to look at the stupid default OS X Icon.

Want to see? Okay:scary head image

Isn't it great? It bears no relation to the program, doesn't tell you what it does, and I can't even remember the name of the piece. But I think it looks cool!

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