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I'm glad that license is the only complaint software enthusiasts have against Shen. Not all languages have to have the same license. It's open source, since th

I'm glad that license is the only complaint software enthusiasts have against Shen. Not all languages have to have the same license. It's open source, since the source is available, and it's free, since you don't have to pay to use it. If you mean that it's not "free" by FSF definition, then just say "it's not Free (tm) FSF(c)".

fdr 14y ago
Very few people have invested enough in Shen to bother finding such pointed complaints. If the implementation is not supported and pushed by something the size and vertically integrated nature of Microsoft or Apple, a cathedral enforced by the license is a huge deterrent for a lot of people. Not all language implementations have to be open source, and conversely, I don't have to invest my infrastructure in all language implementations, especially ones that choose to hobble their fitness in the form of a dubious and paranoid license, which I think is chosen based on reasoning that may have only been defensible (not even 'good') in 1985 or 1990. The comparison to "Linux" (by which they mean, distributions, I presume, instead of the kernel, which is definitely a monolithic development effort) is as laughable as worrying about "what if thirty people write TLS libraries in Shen!?" The problem ostensibly addressed by the license is not solved, and so it is nothing more than an albatross. It's a pity, because the ideas in Shen deserve a better chance than that.
- hackerjim 14y ago
  I was trying to find an argument in your post and gave up trying. Is there one? The sum of your argument seems to be that the license is a huge deterrent for people who think like you. I believe you - and? The license makes the work $free and the only requirement is that if anybody changes it, that it continue to work. Otherwise I can do as I want. Perfectly fair. Also they seem pretty successful in building a whole series of portable cross-platform versions which compared to the crud I've seen under Linux is a very good start. "It's a pity, because the ideas in Shen deserve a better chance than that." I think Shen deserves a better analysis than yours.
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    The license is such a huge deterrent that very little can be inferred from "the license is the only complaint". Nobody knows whether we would have found the language to be amazing or terrible, if only we hadn't stopped considering it because the only implementation is not open to hacking.
    - hackerjim 14y ago
      Well that's your problem - a psychological one, it seems to me.
      - prodigal_erik 14y ago
        I can insist on engaging with my tools as an unfettered human being and still have so much remaining to learn that I need to triage. If there's a problem here, it isn't mine, and insults are not going to get Shen more traction. It won't be the first tool passed over for being needlessly hacker-hostile.
        hackerjim 14y ago
        Right. You never ever engage or use anything that is not open source. Right? Meanwhile out in the real world ..... Your concept of being unfettered tells you that you should have the right to park your tank on somebody else's lawn. Doesn't it hit you that your goal of being unfettered to foobar something you don't understand (and nor do I actually, but I'm humble enough to admit I'm unqualified to hack the Shen kernel) might actually interfere with what the people on that project are trying to achieve? So the end result is that you end up being so fettered by your own attitudes you can't even get to understand what is being gifted for free (in the good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon use of the word). You remain perpetually stuck with yur sense of self-entitlement. That is what I call a psychological problem.
      - fdr 14y ago
        It is a practical problem. The presumption is that the unusual license makes the language's implementation less amenable to survival. I can't justify a reason to absorb that much risk over the lifetime of maintaining programs written in the Shen language, running on the Shenlanguage.org implementation, which is presumed to be the best. The relatively new implementation is hard enough to swallow, but understandably completely necessary and unavoidable. Considering the typically interested audience of advanced static typing include staid system programmers looking for an edge in correctness in systems that take a long time to build and last a long time afterwards, that's a pretty weighty consideration. It is from this viewpoint I evaluate my dependencies. So, sorry. I don't think my analysis -- which is something you seem to sneer at -- is without a justified dimension. To be fair, I sneer at the licensing in turn, so all is even. Hopefully, the authors might understand why so many people may be so hesitant to invest in their platform, doing all the hard work of writing, debugging, and maintaining ports and libraries on such a foundation, as they seem so inclined to ask people to do. Even if the existing authors did all that themselves, proposal of new investment in the platform in organizations at arm's length from Lambda Associates would raise some eyebrows. I could see enormous organizations (like the US DoD or Boeing) being interested. I'd compare Lambda Associates (the Shen author umbrella organization) as a less entrenched Adacore as things stand. Given that I don't feel they solve their purported problem anyway (divergent language implementations are not so much a fragmenting force as multiple libraries with inadequate resources doing the same-ish thing, a problem virtually un-treatable by any policy or license) I'd really hope they'll one day see fit to just not be strange with respect to licensing, and change their mind. The observation of another poster -- that this may ironically increase fragmentation, because someone fascinated with the ideas in the language but not the bizarre license -- may be inclined to make something kind-of-not-quite-like Shen rather than contributing to the existing artifact.

fdr 14y ago

Very few people have invested enough in Shen to bother finding such pointed complaints. If the implementation is not supported and pushed by something the size and vertically integrated nature of Microsoft or Apple, a cathedral enforced by the license is a huge deterrent for a lot of people. Not all language implementations have to be open source, and conversely, I don't have to invest my infrastructure in all language implementations, especially ones that choose to hobble their fitness in the form of a dubious and paranoid license, which I think is chosen based on reasoning that may have only been defensible (not even 'good') in 1985 or 1990. The comparison to "Linux" (by which they mean, distributions, I presume, instead of the kernel, which is definitely a monolithic development effort) is as laughable as worrying about "what if thirty people write TLS libraries in Shen!?" The problem ostensibly addressed by the license is not solved, and so it is nothing more than an albatross. It's a pity, because the ideas in Shen deserve a better chance than that.

hackerjim 14y ago
I was trying to find an argument in your post and gave up trying. Is there one? The sum of your argument seems to be that the license is a huge deterrent for people who think like you. I believe you - and? The license makes the work $free and the only requirement is that if anybody changes it, that it continue to work. Otherwise I can do as I want. Perfectly fair. Also they seem pretty successful in building a whole series of portable cross-platform versions which compared to the crud I've seen under Linux is a very good start. "It's a pity, because the ideas in Shen deserve a better chance than that." I think Shen deserves a better analysis than yours.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  The license is such a huge deterrent that very little can be inferred from "the license is the only complaint". Nobody knows whether we would have found the language to be amazing or terrible, if only we hadn't stopped considering it because the only implementation is not open to hacking.
  - hackerjim 14y ago
    Well that's your problem - a psychological one, it seems to me.
    - prodigal_erik 14y ago
      I can insist on engaging with my tools as an unfettered human being and still have so much remaining to learn that I need to triage. If there's a problem here, it isn't mine, and insults are not going to get Shen more traction. It won't be the first tool passed over for being needlessly hacker-hostile.
      - hackerjim 14y ago
        Right. You never ever engage or use anything that is not open source. Right? Meanwhile out in the real world ..... Your concept of being unfettered tells you that you should have the right to park your tank on somebody else's lawn. Doesn't it hit you that your goal of being unfettered to foobar something you don't understand (and nor do I actually, but I'm humble enough to admit I'm unqualified to hack the Shen kernel) might actually interfere with what the people on that project are trying to achieve? So the end result is that you end up being so fettered by your own attitudes you can't even get to understand what is being gifted for free (in the good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon use of the word). You remain perpetually stuck with yur sense of self-entitlement. That is what I call a psychological problem.
    - fdr 14y ago
      It is a practical problem. The presumption is that the unusual license makes the language's implementation less amenable to survival. I can't justify a reason to absorb that much risk over the lifetime of maintaining programs written in the Shen language, running on the Shenlanguage.org implementation, which is presumed to be the best. The relatively new implementation is hard enough to swallow, but understandably completely necessary and unavoidable. Considering the typically interested audience of advanced static typing include staid system programmers looking for an edge in correctness in systems that take a long time to build and last a long time afterwards, that's a pretty weighty consideration. It is from this viewpoint I evaluate my dependencies. So, sorry. I don't think my analysis -- which is something you seem to sneer at -- is without a justified dimension. To be fair, I sneer at the licensing in turn, so all is even. Hopefully, the authors might understand why so many people may be so hesitant to invest in their platform, doing all the hard work of writing, debugging, and maintaining ports and libraries on such a foundation, as they seem so inclined to ask people to do. Even if the existing authors did all that themselves, proposal of new investment in the platform in organizations at arm's length from Lambda Associates would raise some eyebrows. I could see enormous organizations (like the US DoD or Boeing) being interested. I'd compare Lambda Associates (the Shen author umbrella organization) as a less entrenched Adacore as things stand. Given that I don't feel they solve their purported problem anyway (divergent language implementations are not so much a fragmenting force as multiple libraries with inadequate resources doing the same-ish thing, a problem virtually un-treatable by any policy or license) I'd really hope they'll one day see fit to just not be strange with respect to licensing, and change their mind. The observation of another poster -- that this may ironically increase fragmentation, because someone fascinated with the ideas in the language but not the bizarre license -- may be inclined to make something kind-of-not-quite-like Shen rather than contributing to the existing artifact.