JOJoelMcCracken·Mar 5, 2024
Shen is a very unique language, and one of the ways in which it is unique is that so much of its marketing, information, etc is non-obvious, and less accessible than you might want.
I think the main thing that I find compelling about shen is its type system, especially its sequent calculus system (for defining types in a way that would not be possible for most languages).
The other thing about it that is compelling is how portable it is. the main language is implemented in a simple kernel language; someone who wanted to port the language to a new environment would need to implement a small (relatively) set of primitives, and then you can run the entire shen environment on top of it.
Its worth looking into, however I do caution that it has plenty of rough edges etc.
For me personally I think of it as an inspiration for programming language
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s I wish to develop someday. Additionally, if you ever worked in a certain environment and really dislike that the language is a bit weak, shen might be something you could port to that language and use. For example, I recently updated https://github.com/deech/shen-elisp so that some of its rough edges were a bit smoothed down and should be more usable; I haven't actually written any shen yet that runs in emacs. That's still a ways away.