https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8250316
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8359796
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/
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.
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.
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?
There's also online resources for learning that if you have enough functional programming background ought to be able to get you started: http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/index.html
Added: it's a 400 page print on demand book, I don't have a scale that's suitable for its weight range but the first edition, which has its form factor, is well over a pound.
(http://www.fast-print.net/bookshop/1506/the-book-of-shen-sec...)
That Amazon will ship me print on demand in two days for "free", lulu charges $4, my favorite electronic seller in China charges $2 per item (admittedly each item is lighter than a book) I mean, really, guys?
I'll buy the book, looks interesting, I'll just wait until distribution picks up. I thought about getting a unlicensed ebook copy from "the usual sources" and just donating about 25 bucks to the project, but I'll probably wait.
There's a business concept where you never say "no". If you don't want to do something, like, say, ship outside the UK, you just charge "F you money", or whatever the UK translation is, as a fee. "So how about you rewrite that backend in cobol?" "No problem, but that's going to be kinda expensive, like $750/hr, just so you know" "In that case, lets not do that" I see those kind of shipping charges and I hear this message being delivered. Its not that I can't afford it, its that I don't like being told to F off. Someone doesn't want to ship internationally, in 2015, well, ok, but then they should not be offended if they get made fun of a little bit.
Can anyone enlighten me?
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.
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
Now if only the (cheap!) book on Shen was available as a DRM-free epub book.
However, it looks like it has a lot of interesting features that people might want to use. For example, it can be trivially embedded in pretty much any other language by implementing a handful of core functions. It has an embedded prolog DSL. It has pattern matching, static type checking, lazy evaluation.
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.
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)
Someday when I get sick of firing up python to quickly check that you append() to lists instead of push or add...
My solution to it 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 that as primary setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have packages that work together are great)
My solution to it 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 that as primary setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have packages that work together are great)
My solution to it 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 that as primary setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have packages that work together are great)
My solution to it 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 that as primary setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have packages that work together are great)
My solution to it 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 that as primary setup on an as-and-when basis it's not that bad (and "starter-packs" that have packages that work together are great)