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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?
Shen is Lisp-NG. It's the infusion of Lisp with 30 years of _proper_ PLT research. It's a Lisp that learned from its successors; and for that, it's a Big Deal™.
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I agree, I'd also like to buy the book. Looks pretty good, kind of similar to "The Haskell Road to Logic". But it doesn't look like he's very interested in selling outside the UK. I'll wait and hope it shows up on Amazon.
7 pounds, ~10.50 US$ as a maximum to ship it anywhere in the world, be it Pitcairn Island or the US, doesn't strike me as quite equaling not "very interested in selling outside the UK".
Also, it's pretty trivial to get set up on Lulu and even Amazon and other distributors these days, all of whom can print and ship inside the U.S. and charge local shipping (and many other countries as well). If he's unhappy about the cut they take, he could raise his price by at least $10 (what is saved on shipping) and probably more.
I'd prefer to pay $30-$40 for a book on Amazon that I can use Prime for, than $15 + $10 shipping for a book that may or may not arrive from overseas, and will take a week or more to do so.
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Shen is Lisp-NG. It's the infusion of Lisp with 30 years of _proper_ PLT research. It's a Lisp that learned from its successors; and for that, it's a Big Deal™.
30 years without practical applications is quite an achievement.
Yes, Lisp is the One True Way, but that doesn't mean it's the source of all good ideas in CS.
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From the fine website 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 Ha…
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.
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/
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
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30 years without practical applications is quite an achievement.
There have been plenty of practical applications for this stuff, just not directly in Lisp . Haskell and the ML family have interesting stories to tell; learning ML is on my list simply so that I can understand a lot of this research. Yes, Lisp is the One True Way, but that doesn't mean it's the source of all good ideas in CS.
I would not know why I would write anything I have written in the past in Scheme or Lisp, in this language and would it give me as advantage. The basic application seems to be programming language research and education.
True, many programming languages have applications, but for this I don't know any...
Common Lisp has a lot of applications in possible areas, for example that are a dozen theorem provers from PVS (used by NASA for example) to ACL2 written in Lisp. I'm not aware of a system remotely similar in Shen (or Qi) that's used by people.
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There have been plenty of practical applications for this stuff, just not directly in Lisp . Haskell and the ML family have interesting stories to tell; learning ML is on my list simply so that I can understand a lot of this research. Yes, Lisp is the One True Way, but that doesn't mean it's the source of all good ideas in CS.
I'm talking about this specific Lisp dialect (from Sequent Calculus Research over Qi to Shen). It has near zero applications in 30 years. I would not know why I would write anything I have written in the past in Scheme or Lisp, in this language and would it give me as advantage. The basic application seems to be programming language research and education. True, many programming languages have applications, but for t…
1. Qi/Shen are very young, less than 10 years old.
2. Their adoption has been crippled by wonky licenses.
I'll come back to this question after learning Shen (the wonky license has kept me from more than dipping my toe into it).
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 thos…
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 langu…
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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 langu…
spacemacs looks amazing, thanks for that!
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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.
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…
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spacemacs looks amazing, thanks for that!
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.