Web 2.0 programmer:<p><pre><code>  import urllib
  import json

  def fact(n):
     res = urllib.urlopen('http://math.org/factorial/?' +
         urllib.urlencode({'n':n, 'format':'json'})).read()
     return json.loads(res)['answer']
  fact(6)
</code></pre>
Edit: for a "web scale systems guy" throw an @memcache_memoize in there :)<p>Edit2: fixed a syntax error.<p>Edit3: general cased it. thanks lolcraft!