Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

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I agree in contrast to the previous reply I made. I still play with Shen, and I would love to see SICP in Shen, since Shen has ben implemented for many languages including JavaScript, but it's still a Lisp. I should try my hand at it if I really want to learn Shen.

I am also an APL/J fan and this footnote in SICP rings true:

[15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortran programs, viewing them in terms of maps, ﬁlters, and accumulations. He found that fully 90 percent of the code in the Fortran Scientiﬁc Subroutine Package ﬁts neatly into this paradigm. One of the reasons for the success of Lisp as a programming language is that lists provide a standard medium for expressing ordered collections so that they can be manipulated using higher-order operations. e programming language APL owes much of its power and appeal to a similar choice. In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there is a universal and convenient set of generic operators for all sorts of array operations.

I wanted to say Shen will never be relevant or useful without a change to it's licensing model, but looking at the website it seems like that exact thing has actually happened? It's hard to find concrete info so I'd love for someone to confirm, but IIRC Shen was encumbered by some sort of distasteful closed source model previously but it looks like that's no longer the case? Very excited to dive in if that's the case.

EDIT: > In 2021 the SP kernel was returned to open source forming the basis for the S series of kernels on which this manual is based.

(https://shenlanguage.org/OSM/History.html)

I actually subscribed for a while to SP, but I didn't like having to be connected to the internet to run it. I own two TBOS editions, and it scratches my Haskell, Lisp, Forth (because Klambda), and Prolog itch. I've toyed with the WaspLisp version, and I really want to dive into it. Deech's YT video years ago showing how you could program the front and back end in Shen, because there was a Ruby and JavaScript port really sold me. To me it is relevant, because I can use one language deployed on so many ports. Plus, I just really got into combinators after reading the beginning chapters of Stephen Wolfram's book on them. I don't live and die for open source-only projects. I think only the SP kernel, not all the libraries (grahics, etc.) were. I believe they are still in SP, but I may be wrong.

> [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortran programs

Anyone have a PDF link to a paper about this Fortran analyzer?

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5777

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