On: Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines

[Avshalom]

I use more locals than the core team does in my code, and I'm not currently convinced that's wrong in any sense.

I think that the big "win" in Factor vs say CL is implicit argument passing.

from the article even:

In order to have really small definitions, you do need a stack, I guess - or some other implicit way of passing parameters around;

As far as I'm concerned as long as locals don't get in the way of that they're groovy.

[silentbicycle → Avshalom]

You can get the same implicit argument passing in J (called "tacit programming") and Haskell & ML (via currying, called "points-free style"). It's optional in those languages, though, which strikes me as a good idea: sometimes it's a vast improvement, but sometimes it makes the code hard to follow for no real gain.