Re: Factor

As close as I can tell, Factor is the result of contributions from around 180 contributors over the past 20 years.

Recently, I was reminded of a tool that can produce graphs showing some aspects of contributions to git repositories. The tool is called Git of Theseus written in the Python programming language, which can be used to generate a series of interesting plots showing statistics over time about a project. A similar tool is Hercules, which claims to be a bit faster and is written in the Go programming language.

We can look at code written in each year which, aside from the first few years, mostly continues to exist in the latest version. In addition, we see a healthy and increasing chart over time:

When wondering about the half-life of code, we might want to see how long a particular line of code continues to exist in the project. We can see that 50% of them are still existing after 5 years:

Many of those early contributions came from Slava Pestov, Doug Coleman, Chris Double, and others, and we continue to benefit from the impressive early work that they did for the Factor programming language. We can plot author statistics, and see the large blocks of contributions over time by various authors:

And, as a percentage of lines of code, see that beginning with almost 100% of the source code contributed by Slava Pestov, more recently we have around 20% each from Slava Pestov, Doug Coleman, and myself as well as several other significant authors:

We can generate a more detailed breakdown of these lines of code by language using tokei, but in particular see that we have over 388,000 lines of Factor source code in our latest development version:

$ tokei .

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 Factor               4952       503452       388845        25717        88890
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It was pretty great to generate these graphs, and to reminisce about all the vocabularies available so far, and ponder all those still yet to be written.

Happy coding!