
Next version of Shen will be BSD licensed - tizoc
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qilang/e4-PcL2K2WQ/5OLaUdEFwXAJ
======
lkrubner
If you are interested in Shen, you might be interested in previous discussions
on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250316)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8359796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8359796)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3117235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3117235)

Also, check out Fogus's summary of Lisps:

[http://blog.fogus.me/2011/05/03/the-german-school-of-
lisp-2/](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/05/03/the-german-school-of-lisp-2/)

I signed up as a donor who gives 5 pounds a month to this project, because the
ideas going into this project are extremely innovative and deserve support.

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VLM
I'd like to buy the book related to the language, looks interesting, I am
willing to pay list price, but fedex wants a mere $64 to ship it.

Meanwhile I'm an electronics experimenter kind of guy and I currently have
some weird semiconductors arriving from China where the entire order including
shipping was only about $45 (I believe the shipping portion was $8).
Admittedly a very small and light packet compared to a textbook, but still...

In an online, ebook, internet world, something is wrong with $64 shipping
charge from the UK yet only $8 from China. Maybe a helpful soul could have a
pallet of books shipped to China, then send them around the world for the
usual Chinese shipping "pocket change" cost.

~~~
slackstation
Why in 2015 are we flying paper half-way around the world?

Doesn't Amazon (and others) have a print-on-demand service that would be more
cost effective and not waste the fuel of flying 20lbs of paper across an
ocean?

~~~
steveklabnik
As someone who reads physical books almost exclusively, print on demand is
getting better, but offset still reigns supreme.

~~~
hga
I _really_ like books, although I'm comfortable with online/ebook reading, and
I have to say that the company chosen for this book delivers superb quality
compared to every US origin print on demand book I've looked at, at least for
the first edition of this book. I can't tell it from offset (although some
embedded links came our grey because I assume they were delivered in color and
not caught in galleys). Even the color artwork looks great---ironically, it's
the back corner where the company puts its standard ISBN/price/self-
advertising rectangle that looks bad when looked at very closely and makes
clear someone dropped the ball somewhere (maybe that's an artifact of the
author choosing such a high quality for the cover).

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pnathan
This is really really good news. Shen has some really cool aspects, but the
licensing is, to put it mildly, weird. Having a standard license will really
help adoption and investigation.

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chriswarbo
This is welcome news. Qi (the predecessor of Shen) gets mentioned every now
and then in programming language discussions (eg. it has a Turing Complete
type system), but I've refused to try it so far due to its non-Free license.

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reubensutton
I had a read of the website, but I don't really understand what people use
Shen for, but presumably, it has some benefits over other lisps?

Can anyone enlighten me?

~~~
hga
From the fine website
[http://www.shenlanguage.org/](http://www.shenlanguage.org/)

    
    
      Shen is a portable functional programming language that offers
    
      pattern matching,
      lambda calculus consistency,
      macros,
      optional lazy evaluation,
      static type checking,
      an integrated fully functional Prolog,
      and an inbuilt compiler-compiler.
    

Among other things, it's an attempt to create a Lisp that incorporates some of
the things you find in functional languages like Haskell.

Here's an essay, from an invited talk for the 2009 European Conference on
Lisp, on the motivations to create Qi and then Shen:
[http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/nextlisp(1).htm](http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/nextlisp\(1\).htm)

~~~
e12e
Very interesting essay. Kind of reminds me of OMeta and some of the stuff that
comes out of VPRI with Alan Kay et al. But mostly the approach reminds me of
OMeta's way of "absorbing the easy stuff" and "infiltrating" \- but from a
different (and perhaps more rigorous) angle.

Now if only the (cheap!) book on Shen was available as a DRM-free epub book.

~~~
hga
Indeed, and that's one of the things I find attractive about it, especially
since I believe Lisp is the One True Way and much of the parsing effort that
VPRI worked on is irrelevant to me (but not things like the idea of parsing
illustrations in RFCs and generating a TCP/IP stack!).

As for the book, right now the work on the project by the author is supported
by direct patronage or buying his books. And there's much more in the book
than just "leaning Shen". Here's the web page for it:
[http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-
shen/TBoS/](http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/TBoS/)

Which includes the preface, table of contents, and conceptual dependency
table, i.e. what previous chapters you need to have mastered to understand
each chapter.

From the chapter titles and subtitles, here's stuff that goes substantially
beyond "learning Shen":

    
    
      Higher Order Functions (e.g. partial application and currying)
      Non-determinism (non-deterministic algorithms)
      Shen-YACC (sigh, needed for e.g. pattern matching)
      Lambda Calculus
      Writing Good Programs
      Sequent Calculus
      The SECD Machine
      Shen Prolog (12 pages on Prolog per se)
      The Compilation of the Sequent Calculus
    

And there's a _lot_ of material on types (one of the features of Qi/Shen). So
you get a whole lot of CS exposition in the context of Shen.

~~~
e12e
Oh, I didn't mean to imply the book wasn't (well didn't appear not to be)
great value. I'd be happy to pay ~20 GBP for a DRM free epub version. Not sure
if I'll buy the paperback.

------
tluyben2
I sponsored this move and I am making a port. I really love the language and
hope more people will!

------
nutate
46 functions in Kλ... this is exactly what people like me _need_ in a
programming language. I have a hard enough time remembering if it's add()
append() push() to throw something onto an array in Python or Javascript.
Knowing that clojure has a cool syntax or cool function-to-do-something isn't
all that awesome when I need to just code something.

If I was all in on a language and not a jack of all trades, I'd love those
special features. As is, I like a simple list of reserved words that I have a
half chance of remembering. Glad to see this funding concept worked for the
community.

~~~
mijoharas
I often have the same problems as you (and I have to say, I constantly forget
whether it's push/append too, even in my most commonly used languages).

My solution to the problem has been to setup my development environment to
provide the requisite autocompletion and linting (I use emacs with the
brilliant spacemacs package to be able to have "the one IDE for all
languages").

It takes a bit of setting up for each language you use, but if you do the
setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have
packages that work together are great)

~~~
codygman
spacemacs looks amazing, thanks for that!

~~~
mijoharas
I have to say, it's the best editor experience that I've found by a long way.
In addition the developer Sylvain is incredibly helpful.

~~~
nutate
If it weren't for the other comment, I wouldn't have realized that's spacemacs
is some sort of vim(evil)+emacs beast... Installing now. :)

------
tluyben2
I sponsored this move and I am making a port. I really love the language and
hope more people will!

------
tluyben2
I sponsored this move and I am making a port. I really love the language and
hope more people will!

------
tluyben2
I sponsored this move and I am making a port. I really love the language and
hope more people will!

------
tluyben2
I sponsored this move and I am making a port. I really love the language and
hope more people will!

