3 ms·

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.
- hackerjim 14y ago
  The argument is simply again that the unusual license makes the language less amenable to survival because it does not appeal to people like yourself. That's your entire argument wrapped up in an awful lot of words . Yes - and? BTW if you're going to use words like 'laughable' and 'paranoid', don't complain at people who question your posts as sneering at you. I can work with this implementation, sell my stuff on it, learn from it, its less restrictive than GPL. You apparently cannot do that because your mindset stops you. And as regards libraries; the library AFAIK is under BSD. The kernel is under license and the page explains why. "The analogy that we would like people to carry with them is that of a spinning wheel. The freedom of the wheel to spin depends on there being a fixed hub which at its theoretical geometrical centre point shows zero motion. Our adherence to standards and discipline as system programmers allows you, the applications programmer, to be confident of basing your work on ours."
  - fdr 14y ago
    The other inquiries are: Is this problem really solved by the license? The example given (Linux distributions) is not a good parallel to a language implementation. As per earlier, this is more like worrying if people will come up with thirty ways to implement TLS -- something they are still free to do. Fragmentation analogous to that cited is not curbed in any way, from what I can see. The other side of the coin: is the problem a problem? Do similar but incompatible implementations really typically come from a common base? From what I can see, this is Not A Problem -- usually such subtleties are from complete reimplementations and under-specification or just flat out bugs. So why worry about this? The final concern that I have left unstated, but other posters have also probed at is "if a group of people have the determination to change Shen's semantics and wish to distribute it and maintain it, and people wish to use that, should they be denied? Why should anyone trust the original designing committee over the course of many years, with their only recourse being to start from scratch?" It's hard to understand what the authors of Shen want to get out of the whole thing, but I'm not only perturbed by their choice of aesthetics in this area, but the apparent fact that the problems ostensibly treated seem very much untreated. It is this latter fact -- that the stated concerns seem to have resulted in a non sequitur decisions -- that leaves me even more confused and disappointed. I'll finish this concluding: of course the authors are free to do as they will, but I can't read the soundness in their line of reasoning and am simultaneously disappointed by the result, and I'm sorry I've let that disappointment make me snide.

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.

hackerjim 14y ago
The argument is simply again that the unusual license makes the language less amenable to survival because it does not appeal to people like yourself. That's your entire argument wrapped up in an awful lot of words . Yes - and? BTW if you're going to use words like 'laughable' and 'paranoid', don't complain at people who question your posts as sneering at you. I can work with this implementation, sell my stuff on it, learn from it, its less restrictive than GPL. You apparently cannot do that because your mindset stops you. And as regards libraries; the library AFAIK is under BSD. The kernel is under license and the page explains why. "The analogy that we would like people to carry with them is that of a spinning wheel. The freedom of the wheel to spin depends on there being a fixed hub which at its theoretical geometrical centre point shows zero motion. Our adherence to standards and discipline as system programmers allows you, the applications programmer, to be confident of basing your work on ours."
- fdr 14y ago
  The other inquiries are: Is this problem really solved by the license? The example given (Linux distributions) is not a good parallel to a language implementation. As per earlier, this is more like worrying if people will come up with thirty ways to implement TLS -- something they are still free to do. Fragmentation analogous to that cited is not curbed in any way, from what I can see. The other side of the coin: is the problem a problem? Do similar but incompatible implementations really typically come from a common base? From what I can see, this is Not A Problem -- usually such subtleties are from complete reimplementations and under-specification or just flat out bugs. So why worry about this? The final concern that I have left unstated, but other posters have also probed at is "if a group of people have the determination to change Shen's semantics and wish to distribute it and maintain it, and people wish to use that, should they be denied? Why should anyone trust the original designing committee over the course of many years, with their only recourse being to start from scratch?" It's hard to understand what the authors of Shen want to get out of the whole thing, but I'm not only perturbed by their choice of aesthetics in this area, but the apparent fact that the problems ostensibly treated seem very much untreated. It is this latter fact -- that the stated concerns seem to have resulted in a non sequitur decisions -- that leaves me even more confused and disappointed. I'll finish this concluding: of course the authors are free to do as they will, but I can't read the soundness in their line of reasoning and am simultaneously disappointed by the result, and I'm sorry I've let that disappointment make me snide.