https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/fZZvPzCTVyA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
tl;dr: in a couple of weeks version 17 will be released with the usual bug fixes etc. and BSD licensed.
