I know I'm a little behind on this, considering Shen was created in 2011, but I've been studying Scheme (The Little Schemer), Clojure, PicoLisp, and LFE recently after having completed a few of the most common Lisp books (SCIP, HtDP, Software Design for Flexibility, The Little Schemer) and most of the Lisp dialects always seem to fall short for me. Specifically I don't think any of them go quite far enough taking the code-as-data paradigm to the extreme. Where they fall short, as far as I understand them, is that most are eagerly evaluated, which makes implementation of partial application and currying non-trivial.
Shen is different. Shen is amazing, especially for functional programming, which I see as the true future of computing. Turing machines are easier for the average programmer to grok, but the lambda calculus with its simple evaluation semantics just makes more sense to me. The best part about Shen, which is usually lacking in Lisps, is that it comes with an optional type checker! Clojure is pretty close with spec but Shen really beat them to the punch in such a powerful way.
I'm convinced this project, the Yggdrasil project, will be the future of programming if it can gain enough adoption. It's simply amazing to think about writing one single language and being able to transpile it to any other language. I hope you find this as interesting as I did. Cheers!
Tip to anyone who is coming up with a language: Show examples as the very first thing on your homepage. I want to see the syntax, not read a philosophical tome.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] threadShen is different. Shen is amazing, especially for functional programming, which I see as the true future of computing. Turing machines are easier for the average programmer to grok, but the lambda calculus with its simple evaluation semantics just makes more sense to me. The best part about Shen, which is usually lacking in Lisps, is that it comes with an optional type checker! Clojure is pretty close with spec but Shen really beat them to the punch in such a powerful way.
I'm convinced this project, the Yggdrasil project, will be the future of programming if it can gain enough adoption. It's simply amazing to think about writing one single language and being able to transpile it to any other language. I hope you find this as interesting as I did. Cheers!
https://shenlanguage.org/TBoS/Programs/24.4.txt
it's a LISP variant