This Thursday, April 2nd is the April meeting of the Lambda Lounge. We’ll be grooving on two totally new topics for the lounge: the concatenative language Factor and the Parrot VM.

First, local polyglot Kyle Cordes will be giving a talk on the Factor language. Factor is a concatenative language where functions are always applied postfix to the values on the stack. Factor has an object system similar to CLOS in Lisp and concurrency functionality inspired by message-passing in languages like Erlang.

Other concatenative languages that I’ve heard of are Joy and Forth (there are others of course). Here are a pair of good articles on Joy (by two of my favorite bloggers Debasish Ghosh and Daniel Spiewak) which may be reminiscent of what we will see in Factor. I’m looking forward to learning more in the talk.

Second, Charles Sharp will be giving a talk about Parrot, the VM that has grown out of the now mythic Perl 6. However, Parrot 1.0 was just released on March 17th, so this is a very timely talk. Even though Parrot grew out of Perl 6 ideas, it is intended to support many dynamic languages and a number of languages are currently working in some form on Parrot. [I note that there are implementations of both Forth and Joy on Parrot, hinting at some grand unification talk here. :)]

As always, this should be an epic fun and geeky event and I any and all in sight of St. Louis to check it out.