How the Factor meeting went in New York

I invited all of you, at the very last minute, to come meet me in New York to talk about Factor and stuff, and at least two people asked me to post in detail about what happened... so here's my best shot. Dan McCarthy was the brave soul who attended, and we had a really interesting conversation about various aspects of programming. One thing we discussed was the inverse pattern matching library. I showed Dan how it works, and he found it really interesting that quotations were sequences at runtime—similar to s-expressions, but directly executed. Dan works as a programmer/sysadmin at a company that provides closed captioning services for media companies, and it seems like a more interesting task than I would have thought. There are some text encoding issues there (the HD captioning standard, if I understand it correctly, actually has encoding left unspecified for characters outside of Windows-1252, though it leaves room for two-byte and three-byte characters) and Dan has been researching them for a project for a Korean client. I explained the encoding definition protocol to Dan, and I'm going to try to get him to implement East Asian encodings, which there seem to be quite a few of in use (Shift-JIS, ISO 2022-JP, GB 2312, Big5, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB 18030). These all need big tables for encoding and decoding, and some require state to decode. Many have multiple possible representations of the same string for output, which complicates things somewhat. So, there's not much to report, but I've definitely learned my lesson about organizing things: I need to announce things more than 11 days in advance, and I need to advertise them better.

Another FactorCon in NYC

Zed Shaw suggested to me recently that we hold a Factor-related meeting this month in New York, since I'll be there on March 28th. Since he hasn't done anything to organize it, I thought I'd take the lead: let's meet at

Earth Matters
177 Ludlow St, Manhattan, NY, USA

This'll happen at 7 PM, on Friday the 28th. The idea of the event is to talk about Factor, meaning (depending on who comes) sharing current projects in Factor, or a Factor tutorial for beginners, or a little of both. It'll all be very informal. You can come whether or not you know Factor.

Unlike the recent PyCon, this Factor convention will not be beholden to our sponsors' interests! But if we had any sponsors we might be... it's a little too late to solicit them.

If you can come, please send me an email so I can get an idea of how many people are going to show up. (Sorry about the short notice.) I hope to see you there!

Factor hack in NYC

This is kinda short notice, but if anyone's in the New York area today, Zed Shaw is organizing another one of his Factor hackfests in Manhattan, which I'll be going to. The details are at his blog (unfortunately I can't find a link to the particular article, just the blog index). So it'll be at Earth Matters (177 Ludlow St) at 7 PM on Friday, January 11th.

Update: Sorry to those of you who couldn't come on such short notice, or on this continent. The whole meeting was really fun, though. In all, nine people came, four of whom had barely seen Factor at all before then. So I gave a little tutorial introduction along the lines of this blog post using factorial as an example. I also explained inverse, demoed shufflers, and talked about stuff about bignums and complexity, but I don't think I explained those things in enough depth to be clear. Luckily it wasn't a complete monologue on my part, as Zed and a couple others made helpful comments to help my descriptions and stuff. Then we devolved into random discussions about various things, some Factor-related and others not, which occupied the majority of the evening and was really fun. There's a good chance I'll be back in New York next April for the first few days of Passover, and I hope to see many of you there at a later Factor meetup!