Factor Language Blog

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but I remember several months ago somebody in #concatenative (eiz, perhaps) mentioning that Groovy has reached 120,000 lines of Java code… they asked how can a scripting language get so big, especially as it doesn’t provide its own runtime services and runs on the JVM? Well if you look at the Groovy CVS today, you’ll see it has in fact managed to grow to 300,000 lines.

In comparison, Factor consists of 8400 lines of C and 29,000 lines of Factor. This includes a lot of code that a JVM-based language does not have to implement, such as platform-specific GUI bindings, native code generation, and the UI.

I tend to think the majority of code people write is overly complicated, full of redundancy, and designed for such flexibility that in practice is not needed at all. I hope one day this trend reverses.