Core Factor developers and their projects

Here's a quick listing of the main current Factor developers and their projects. Hopefully, it'll help beginners navigate the community better.

I wanted to keep this list short, but I hope I'm not offending anyone by leaving them off, so please tell me if there's some glaring omission here. There's definitely no official "core" group Factor developers; these are just the people who have contributed a lot in the past. I put the names in order of seniority (in terms of time using Factor).

Slava Pestov
IRC nick: slava

Slava is Factor's creator. He wrote almost all of the core, the compiler and the Factor virtual machine, the frontend of the Factor UI and the backend on X11 and Mac OS X, a detailed math library and the Factor HTTP server. Slava's definitely the leader of the Factor project, but he doesn't tend to operate in a dictatorial way, instead taking input from many people on language design decisions.

Chris Double
IRC nick: doublec

Chris was Factor's first adopter. He wrote a bunch of interesting libraries, including one for lazy lists, another for parsing expression grammars (PEGs), a compiler from a subset of Factor to Javascript, and an 8086 emulator suitable for playing old console games. He also wrote a bunch of useful bindings to various multimedia libraries and a bunch of other things too numerous to list here. Unfortunately for us, Chris has a full-time job, limiting his time to hack on Factor.

Eduardo Cavazos
IRC nick: dharmatech

Ed is a non-conformist and proud of it. He devised Factor's current module system, where vocabs in a USE: clause that haven't already been loaded are loaded automatically. He also wrote a window manager in Factor, a really cool artificial life demo called "boids", a chat server/client, an art programming language implementation and an alternative object system for Factor.

Daniel Ehrenberg (me)
IRC nick: littledan

I'm working on Factor's XML library, Unicode support, and a concatenative pattern matching library. I also have this blog, where I try to write useful (or useless) things about Factor.

Doug Coleman
IRC nick: erg

Doug made a bunch of important libraries including the calendar library, SQL bindings (he's currently working on an abstraction layer), a Mersenne Twister random number generator, some other math libraries, a cryptography library and integration for several text editors. Doug took over maintaining Windows I/O after another contributer, Mackenzie Straight, stopped maintaining it. Doug's really friendly to the beginners in Factor, even the ones who ask stupid questions.

Mackenzie Straight, Elie Chaftari and Alex Chapman, among others, also contributed a lot. You can see what everyone's done by looking in the vocabulary brower included in Factor.

At the risk of repeating myself, when you have questions about anything related to Factor, including any of these libraries discussed, you should pose the question to the general Factor forums: the IRC channel #concatenative on Freenode and the mailing list. We'd be happy to answer them.

Update: Fixed attributions for Doug and Elie, and changed last paragraph.