https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/fZZvPzCTVyA
I'll chip in a little and hope this pulls it toward BSD, at which point I'm willing to start investing in the infrastructure.
What's the current licensing situation? I would prefer a copyleft license, but if it already had a free license, I don't really care if it's similar to a BSD license or not.
Edit: Ah, found it:
http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html
Wow, this looks awful. It's a vanity license with language that is very unfamiliar to me. Can a license declare something to be legal or not, isn't that for judges to decide, not licenses? It has a bunch of weird clauses that I don't want to try to understand, and Wikipedia claims this is GPL-incompatible and non-free software.
Yuck.
Yeah, ok, I'm kinda interested in a free license now.
The concept of the license is OK, the author wants a "Write Once, Run Anywhere" landscape where you can't break the spec and therefore other people's code, but the implementation is bad enough a lot of people including myself gave up on investing in the language and ecosystem.
The basic idea is to construct a kernel with 40 functions in such a way that the language is easily portable. With those 40 functions Shen is like a mixture of Lisp, prolog and typep racket.
I should like to see a version of Shen in Nim.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/HBBjtIxegFY/Wmv3Lh1IR...
Tarver claims the current license is more open than the GPL. I don't understand the basis for that claim.
tl;dr: in a couple of weeks version 17 will be released with the usual bug fixes etc. and BSD licensed.
All the money is being used to systematically upgrade stlib; instituting a series of monographs in computer science documenting the library. The first is in graph theory.
Mark
> 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.
> Shen has one of the most powerful type systems within functional programming. Shen runs under a reduced instruction Lisp and is designed for portability. The word ‘Shen’ is Chinese for 'spirit' and our motto reflects our desire to liberate our work to live under many platforms.
