TBoS 3rd edition

[Mark Tarver]

Just to let you know this title is now available to order from the Fast-Print Publishing website

http://www.fast-print.net/bookshop/1787/the-book-of-shen-3rd-ed

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

To reprise.  I've corrected all the errata in the 2nd edition I can find and two chapters have been extensively rewritten.  The changes are:

* the errata have been fixed

* the chapter on model checking has been replaced by a chapter on abstract and semi-abstract datatypes. In particular I show how to implement an ML-style 

  (algebraic datatypes) type discipline on top of Shen.   I thought this would be more interesting.

* the final chapter has been substantially changed, improved and and brought forward into the text.   I spend this chapter explaining how to control the proof process in type checking and tracing errors; hence the use of (spy +) is explained early (following Aditya's suggestion)

* the glossary of system functions is brought up to date

This is a less extensive revision than the move from the 1st to the 2nd edition - which involved 50% of the text - the move to the 3rd edition involves probably 10%.

This is probably the final and definitive edition!

Mark

[Bruno Deferrari]

Great!

I like the new cover.

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BD

[Kean Lau]

Fast Print's website is strange. After ordering you don't get an order number. Does anyone know if those details are emailed later?

[Kean Lau]

Mark, what's the plan now for the concurrency extension you were working on? It's on hold for the foreseeable future until you get a research grant?

Are you able to share any details with us at this point? I presume the extension has some foundation in Milner's Pi Calculus or Hoare's CSP?

[Mark Tarver]

That is correct.    To invert Lenin,  those do not eat shall not work.* So I don't work on it.          

Worked beautifully as far as it went  :).  No, a rather different direction.

Mark

* V. I. Lenin Speech Delivered At The First (Inaugural) All-Russia Congress Of Mineworkers https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/01.htm

[Mark Tarver]

Let me clarify my position.  The computing community, and open source, has nothing to offer somebody like me.  Shen is BSD not because I believe in open source but because I was paid for it and I keep my promises.  Shen exists because it was paid for (largely from Russia) and I kept my promise.  I maintain the sources  but I do other things now. Even this group is moderated by other people now.  

Shen is now OS.  but this solves little.  I never believed it would.  OS in itself is bankrupt methodologically and economically; it cannot power anything without corporation money.   If programmers haven't grasped that they are well behind. Torvalds has said that in the plainest terms.  OS minus corporation money = CRAP - look it up. 

Hence OS favours the corporations who have the power to exploit people's work and return nothing.  As a movement it owes primacy, not to intellectual argument, but to the exigencies of easy downloading, look-at-me, and the power of the hard sell.  It has resulted in the largest dump of abandoned effort in human history.

I see OS in Marxist terms, as a religion enabling one group of people to extract surplus labour from another group of people at zero cost - just like the church used religion to extort money from the peasantry back in feudal times.    The people who promote it like Perens, RMS, and Torvalds are paid corporation money to sell it to programmers, just like the bishops of the old religion.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.   The old tricks still work.

Nothing is going to change until programmers reclaim their consciousness and get off their knees.  IMO, the way forward is through the formation of worker cooperatives based around joint work.  However the programming community just hasn't got to that point yet.  If they could get there there would be forward movement and a better future.  I could work on that ticket. But programmers seem to be caught up in a junkie's dream and they won't let go of it.  I'm not into that dream and I'm not going to subsidise junkies. 

Mark 

[fuzzy wozzy]

by all logic and common sense, I really have nothing to say about this topic, and yet...

firstly, if anyone is doing anything to do with concurrency, someone once said that the
true road to concurrency is (paraphrasing, of course), through the second-order logic,
and devoted some 300+ pages of a book to explain what he meant...

as far as collaborative joint efforts go, it's a beautiful concept that's absolutely essential
in some situations while remaining as an abstractly beautiful concept in other cases,
especially, I don't mind hinting at, when it comes to languages like shen or any of the lisp-family
languages.

take any of the shen ports as an example, stellar in achievement each and every one,
and yet how many were as a result of huge joint effort? take shen-js, for example,
sure there was an acknowledgement attributed to helpful hints from another programmer,
but it might not be too far-fetched to say that it was, mostly, a result of one person's persistent
effort that made it possible.

somehow this reminds me of that famous story about paul graham selling his web store app to
yahoo for $50+ million, he had to increase the size of his company by hiring a few more programmers
at the last minute in case yahoo had a hard time believing that a company of only a few programmers
could have created such a valuable program, maybe there were a few more details that were left out,
but that's about the size of it.

or take willi's effort of finding a determinant of 250x250 matrix in 1.5 secs,
sure there's factorization involved, and such, timewise I don't know how it fares with ones done in
other languages, but it might be the envy of the envy for some of the languages that attempted to
try similar methods without enjoying such record-breaking time. I myself do not see a way of doing it
in under a minute (using laplace formula), but the point being that it was yet another example of one
programmer doing something noble and note-worthy.

to me, shen is a baby that is not even born yet, or born but only a few hours old still...
I hope to be wrong in this regard.

[Mark Tarver]

As far as the Shen project goes you have two components; an OS development/ economic model and a pile of code.   One is elegant, structured, original, highly successful in meeting the goals set, has been taken up by some intelligent people and is well documented.  The other is an incoherent pile of dross with a history of reverse engineering going back years, a 98% project failure rate, and an economic model that does not work and a set of online forums like reddit populated by dickheads w.o. any technical knowledge at all .  What you also have here, is a number of people who think that the marriage of these two will help that code and project to flourish.

Guess what.  Think again!     One part works and the other does not and it's not hard to see which is which.

I've said before and I'll say it again; that the smart people here need to get this.   Being smart about coding is not enough.

Ramil's stuff is excellent; so is a lot of the other work.   Altogether you are looking at 6 people maybe out of the 478 who actually drive stuff - this is quite typical of OS projects.    They need to apply the principles of Leninism (which are actually in the Bible too BTW).   

Mark

On Tuesday, 30 June 2015 06:33:42 UTC+1, fuzzy wozzy wrote:

by all logic and common sense, I really have nothing to say about this topic, and yet...

firstly, if anyone is doing anything to do with concurrency, someone once said that the
true road to concurrency is (paraphrasing, of course), through the second-order logic,
and devoted some 300+ pages of a book to explain what he meant...

as far as collaborative joint efforts go, it's a beautiful concept that's absolutely essential
in some situations while remaining as an abstractly beautiful concept in other cases,
especially, I don't mind hinting at, when it comes to languages like shen or any of the lisp-family
languages.

http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/shendoc.htm#Kl

[Mark Tarver]

No; they don't do it  unless you pay for tracked.  They're pretty good though at delivery.

Mark

[Kean Lau]

The cases where OS has succeeded involve:

1. there is an established proprietary product
2. an individual or a small group develop an OS product for personal self interest
3. the OS product & the community around it becomes mature enough to complete with the proprietary product and you either get corporate backing or build a new business around it based on support fees, utilising the product as part of a paid service or via consulting/training work

If you don't meet all of those criteria, you're highly likely to fail. You're better off developing a proprietary (or mostly proprietary) product yourself.

So the question for the Shen community is, does someone think they can build a killer proprietary product with Shen or if we go via the OS route are there enough people with the same personal self interest to take on an existing proprietary product?

Otherwise as Mark pointed out, it's going to be really hard for Shen to gain any traction.

Perhaps the first question to ask is what does everything think Shen excels at (or should excel at) that other programming languages would really struggle with? That answer would provide guidance on a product.

[deech]

I think Shen will really shine as a language that unifies a diverse codebase without making it homogeneous. Most language designers offer what I call "terminal" languages. Just like terminal nodes in a grammar they hope to convince developers that they are final word in a some design space.

As a result their implementations are these very well-engineered but hulking things that are wonderful to work with as long as one sticks to the platform they were built for. GHC, Haskell's reference implementation, is a beautiful piece of work, but required very smart people years to port it to JavaScript and ARM.

Shen, however, can mimic the semantics of most languages at both the term and type level. Unlike all the "glue" languages or data formats that came before it, Shen can present an API written in one language to another without any loss of fidelity. This means that it allows two languages can converse as equals. I don't know any other language that can do this.

-deech

[Mark Tarver]

Open source is dead as a model; any model which lacks some idea of distributive justice is dead from the go.   Anybody repeating the arguments of ESR in TC&B in 2015 is simply out of touch with the literature.  Even Perens said in 2007 that ESR was wrong on the economics in saying support would fill the revenue gap.  Since then we've had this.

And forget about 'killer apps'.  That's 80s and 90s old-style thinking when apps were big (perhaps even then the market was largely filled up).  The smart money isn't on apps and we have all the apps we need.  The fact they are written in crappy languages doesn't matter because they exist and there are plenty of programmers trained in crappy languages to service them.

'Traction', 'mind share' all those early oughties buzzwords - strictly for a past generation.   Out of date and needs to be scrapped.  Junk that thinking.  OpenSSL had more mind share than nearly any app alive and was crippled by underfunding.  OpenBSD could not meet their electricity bill.

You need to write BULLSHIT across most of the OS propaganda coming over the net from reddit et al because they're ill-informed.  Read the serious reports (stuff done by study groups) which dismantle the whole OS myth and show it to be the bollocks it largely is and was.  The OS engine will not deliver and never will; except in those cases where no real intelligence is needed e.g. copying a commercial product to avoid paying. 

 My prediction given to Willi 6 months ago, was that going OS would add little in terms of action.  That is true.  My prediction for the next six months?  On the OS front Shen will be exactly where it is now.  

 

 Really stop carrying this bloody decomposing OS albatross around like some fucking religious relic and start clean.  Give yourselves a chance. Shen works;  OS does not.  Start there.

 

 Mark

 

 (who is finally getting ready to finish his lecture course, yay!)

[Mark Tarver]

I just got my copies today and ... you're quite right,  as an edition it is the handsomest of the lot, and qualitatively the best.  So in all a good way to finish.

Mark

On Saturday, June 27, 2015 at 4:52:28 PM UTC+1, Bruno Deferrari wrote:

Great!

I like the new cover.

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to let you know this title is now available to order from the
> Fast-Print Publishing website
>
>
> http://www.fast-print.net/bookshop/1787/the-book-of-shen-3rd-ed
>
>
> Mark
>
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[fuzzy wozzy]

haha dr. tarver said "fucking" (I recommend he does so more often)

[Kean Lau]

Sure I agree that the OS model is pretty broken and that moving Shen to a BSD license is unlikely make any meaningful impact. You mentioned that the way forward is worker cooperatives. Cooperation on what though?

I'm curious to find out what everyone else is using Shen for. Are there enough people using Shen for similar domains to start any cooperation?

I was initially drawn to Shen for being a statically typed Lisp, but now I'm more interested in its logic programming capabilities and I'm exploring where it can go for automated reasoning.

[Kean Lau]

Sure I agree that the OS model is pretty broken and that moving Shen to a BSD license is unlikely make any meaningful impact. You mentioned that the way forward is worker cooperatives. Cooperation on what though?

I'm curious to find out what everyone else is using Shen for. Are there enough people using Shen for similar domains to start any cooperation?

I was initially drawn to Shen for being a statically typed Lisp, but now I'm more interested in its logic programming capabilities and I'm exploring where it can go with automated reasoning.

[Kean Lau]

Shen can present an API written in one language to another without any loss of fidelity. This means that it allows two languages can converse as equals.

My first thought on the benefit of portability is it's easy to spread Shen to as many platforms as possible. That's an interesting insight though. I wouldn't have thought about this as one of the capabilities that Shen's portability gives you.

[Mark Tarver]

People don't discuss business propositions in open forum; but the concept of a worker's cooperative is that the people who create the wealth get to consume it.   That is what communism is about.   And you can find the source of this idea in Thessalonians which is where Lenin's quote ('those who do not work shall not eat') comes from   OS is populated by large numbers of freetards who consume and don't contribute.   RMS was and probably still is funded by corporations.  What a scam.

Worker's cooperatives are the antidote to corporate power.  Workers do not outsource their labour;  the present situation arises from the lack of worker control over their jobs and the failure to seize control of the means of production.    Workers post-WWII traded the goals of socialism - control of production - for a bigger slice of the pie leaving the pie itself in the hands of a managerial class.    The worker situation was provisional,  since they were bartering, capital eventually eliminated their bargaining power.

Mark

[Mark Thom]

Sounds like anarcho-syndicalism. It would be interesting to participate in a hacker's cooperative of some kind.

[fuzzy wozzy]

for the longest time now, the constant theme has been either a killer app, or
how to showcase shen, or dataflow/concurrency, or cooperative this cooperative that,
with nothing really to show for any of it, as far as anything apparent that could be
discerned from the forum discussions...

only tangible inkling of something being developed by someone using shen was a few
posts about natural language processing by someone here who is not saying much,
probably inversely proportional to the amount of great work being done behind the scene,
at least in his case, one may imagine...

shen being such a fantastically effective language for porting purposes (for proof, read the following),
it acquired several friends along the way, thankfully, such as shen-js, shen-ruby, shen-chibi scheme, shen-python,
shen-clojure, shen-java, shen-haskell, and of course, it comes equipped with shen-sbcl and shen-clisp...
and possibly in the works are shen-c and shen-c++, one may be privileged to look forward to,

and yet, I have a distinct feeling that the initial enthusiasm for "write once, run everywhere" is waning,
sure, just as the moon gets full then it will be waning, and the cycle continues, but I think that when it comes to
shen, it's waning prematurely, in short, it's waning before it has reached its full potential, why is this, you might wonder?

it could be a lagging or absent enthusiam and appreciation for the great porting works that are being done
on this platform, it could be some of the developers have to feed their family and they simply cannot wait for this -ism
or that -ism to kick to allot them the just share of the pie to enable them to continue with their noble work without the
petty (or it should be petty if it isn't already) concerns for where their next meal might be coming from?

one could forever argue about what an effed up world it is that one must do the noblest work in the computing field
the highest that anyone could hope to be lucky to do, yet in the very next moment worry about what one must do for
the rent or groceries, electric bills, etc... I can only say to that: "I feel ya" (and might I add, hold on my brother, as this
absurdity will not be allowed to go on much longer, thankfully haha)

just as garlics are an anathema to vampiric energy/resource sucking, it's possible that some of us have figured out
the game and realize that now, the game is OVER, and it's time to move on to a higher plateau, whatever it may entail,
it's GOT TO BE better than this b.s. that most of us, certainly dr. tarver HIMSELF, had to endure for longer than
morally and ethically allowable.

anyway, I don't want to bore y'all, so I'll just say that if closed-source if good enough for bill gates of microsoft fame
(maybe some of you have heard of him), then it probably might be good enough for most here, and if and when
bill gates feels it proper to go open source with all microsoft products (yay, finally f# for the general programming community?)
then might most here feel it ok to likewise go open source.

in short, when in doubt, look at what bill gates of microsoft fame does and mimic to your heart's desire.

p.s. for those who still do not REALIZE: the game is over now, folks (and thank GOD for that)

[fuzzy wozzy]

and the fact that shen-ecl was forgotten to be mentioned is simply a testominal to all things mentioned above...

[Mark Tarver]

Anarcho-syndicalism is pretty much it;  but it requires Shenturians consciously turning their backs on open source and embracing cooperation based on contribution.   That is workable.  If people, and I really mean myself and the various platform holders assembled here, choose that route, it would be a very important social experiment.  Perhaps more important even than Shen itself.  The world desperately now needs a new way forward.  If it succeeded here, it would point the way.  But it requires breaking a habit of mind.   Are people willing to do that?

Mark

[tycho luyben]

I am new to this community but bringing back the open source or not discussion is not a productive one IMHO. A language (and most base libraries or tools) will not get any traction closed source; there are a few examples against that notion, notably kx and things like Mathematica. However those, and other examples you might come up with, have another huge difference from Shen; they are used in (large) production environment. As far as I know, no one is using Shen for writing critical software. Unlike say, Scala or Clojure, the designers of the language are not using the product in their company to write software for clients or for themselves and thus making actual value. A sign of that is that most people are not even able to read the contents of this Google group due to it being academic experiments.

My goal for 'joining' Shen has always been making money and for that reason I am only working on ready to use and practical things like Meteor integration and such; when that is all working well it brings me concrete business value: Lisp, for most purposes, is just more efficient to write in especially comparing to JS and Java. And that will make me money and thus we can all make money; the opensource part will only help here. Worse; if it is not opensource no larger company will accept me working with this technology.

Then there is the other reason (why I did not pick another Lisp like Clojure or even one of my other favorite languages like Mercury or Haskell); Shen is easy to port and embed. This has, for now only been partly proven; the runtime on top of KL is so heavy that startup times of all versions, for practical use, is too long. I emphasize practical use here as I know for experimenting that does not count. A lot more thinking and experimenting should go into reasoning about the Shen->Kl translation.

Which brings me to the last hurdle for using this in production; becuase the libraries and runtimes are not tested in enteprise and production settings, they are not mature enough; the leaky abstractions are really showing here because of the lack of a complete definition. When something compiles to another language you often need to debug the native language as a lot of errors and idiosynchrasies are pushed to the base platform. Here we have two; the native language and KL; t be really productive in enterprise environments we would need to be able to debug both in some manner which makes sense. If you check Haxe, Monkey-X, Clojurescript or Purescript, which all compile to JS, you can see that debugging the resulting JS code feels natural; it resembles the code you wrote enough to easily debug. In contrast, the Shen JS generated code, besides the function naming, has very little to do with the code you wrote in Shen. Which makes it incredibly hard to debug or reason about when things go wrong. That is not to dimish Ramil his excellent efforts in any way, but it will be a more uphill battle because of this; the implementation has to be rocksolid and provide feedback, in a completely closed loop manner, especially for starters (and the most trivial way to start for modern people is Javascript!) because when something bad happens and it falls through JS they will not figure out what happened and give up while in Purescript you simply look up the line of code and see the complete resemblance to the code you wrote and thus you can see what is wrong.

I think the discussion of open source or not is a futile one; Shen was never seriously given a chance as you cannot reasonably can write anything in it which you can actually publish with confidence in a production environment. My goal is to make that happen asap but I have people to answer to in doing that and they do not want to risk getting bitten by something instable hence it will take time and time is in short supply.

Anyway; I am certainly not for closed source in any way but not for languages or trivial tools; it will not work. Making money is easy; get a project in real life and implement it with Shen; do that 50x with the most active members in this group and split the money (that will be enoug for all to live on) and in the end there will be libraries, runtimes, compilers and frameworks which can, provably, be used to write robust software in different markets rapidly. Then the people and money will swarm in and Shen Ltd will create real (closed source) products, libraries and consultancy on top of opensource like they all do and make a lot of money.

Coming from a consultancy and product development background, this is feasible in the short term if people are willing to it. Projects are there for the taking ; in universities but outside as well. I get projects funded by uni's all the time and they do not care about the tech. Nor do some companies. The beginning will be uphill as all the issues I stated above will become painfully clear to all involved ; we will resolve them and the result will be a robust set of tools and libraries people will want to use because of the success stories. And then there is some money, experience and investment opportunity to start worrying about closed source stuff.

My 2 cents.

[Mark Tarver]

Well Shen is OS; so if your ideas work there is no obstacle.  But  'productive' be damned.   How about being honest and stating things as they are?   OS has failed across many dimensions and what I've said above is accurate and substantiated by serious reports. Thinking outside the box requires placing all ideas in question and if a set of ideas does not work, you ditch them.   

Ramil's stuff is excellent btw; but that is a function of Ramil, not OS.   And that work was in progress before we went OS.    Likewise Greg and Bruno had their work in place before OS.   OS has so far brought zero contribution.

OS has currently very little to offer developers; this is the nub.    You can't really promote participation, mine or anybody's,  until you fix the model.and fixing something requires admitting there is something wrong.

Mark

[tycho luyben]

Well I do not agree with most of that; honest as things are as you say; 

- if you want to start you have little guidance what to use or how to use it (unless you buy TBoS and even then) ; you can see people asking what version to use, if they are stable, what features the different versions have

- there is no-one using this in enterprises as far as I know (or is advertised anywhere), so there is no reason to pick this over anything else ; more a deterrent

- OS works but there is still a lot of 'old pain' ; every time Shen gets mentioned somewhere, someone has to jump in and tell it's open source now as usually the threads are still cut off with 'Shen has a weird license, not touching it',  so it will take some time for people to realise 

- OS might, in your eyes, not have much return (yet) but it does not hurt either; the previous license simply did hurt and there is plenty of proof of that in forums, IRC, blogs and other discussion sites

I am waiting for the example, after the 80s where a non open source language got any traction or made any money /before/ it was used in actual production environments. And even after there is only a handful of examples, while 100s (1000s?) of companies creating open source make billions by selling support, consultancy, additions or re-licencing on top. 

"Ramil's stuff is excellent btw; but that is a function of Ramil, not OS."  => not my point, i'm saying it's hard to debug compared to 'the competition' because it was never a goal to be able to do that while the others set out to do that. That is not because of Ramil, that's because this was never a requirement.   

Also; "OS has currently very little to offer developers; this is the nub" => and closed source does? No-one is paying or will be paying without significant investment into actually create value which lays in libraries and tools ; once those are there I still believe OS will benefit the eco system and the bankaccounts of those involved more than closing it (for the most part ;specialist libraries, frameworks and entire end user software can/should be closed or very differently/dually licensed; i'm not saying it shouldn't be). 

I think it's a good plan to work together in some collective (there is that word again) and divide the spoils based on input however that leaves many months (or forever if it doesn't work out) hard work without rewards; if that work doesn't go into 'the greater good' like OS or isn't paid then it's a waste. Which is why I said; why not do industry projects to make money which grows the libraries and tools and selectively open/close/relicense parts based on that experience?

[Mark Tarver]

The 'OS works' is really a mantra; this is not new thinking.  It is old thinking reaffirmed without foundation.     You believe you are right - so make it work.   So far, nada.

There's some total lack of cognisance here about my motives.    I'm not here to impress blockheads on reddit and twitter.  This is not my raison d'etre.    I'm not here to fix your problems.     The problems of OS remain with or without my comment on them.    

I'm about to embark on a career as a teacher and online educator.   So in a sense I'm just an observer here.   But a shift of consciousness is needed, not just to understand Shen, but to move Shen forward.  The computing community does not have it and the OS community does not have it either.  You have to go back to first principles - look, as Mark said, to the anarcho-syndicalists.    Start with worker empowerment and  think about freeing people and not code and you might make some forward movement.  But I'm not hanging around for people to arrive at that consciousness; because I've other things to do.

Mark

[fuzzy wozzy]

arthur whitney, creator of k and q languages of kx fame, was toying with the idea of going open source
with k language a few years ago, until he saw how some on a discussion forum weren't being appreciative
of his work and decided against it.

well, maybe that was the right choice since banks and investment firms are only happy to shell out hundreds
of thousands of dollars for a privilege to use his product, someone released an open source version of k language,
called kona, so maybe all is not lost...

there was a funny episode on that forum when arthur whitney released a few lines of compact code in k, that
worked as a complete database/sql, and some master sql programmer posted an equivalent version in sql with
just a few more lines of code, thus showing that sql can work just as well as k language, and people were saying that
banks and investment firms were paying out well over $100,000 for something like that, the links to the code are
broken now, perhaps those were the more innocent times...

k and q are inspired by apl, so is j language, which went open source recently, but when it was not open source,
the source code could be purchased depending on the needs of the clients, for tens of thousands of dollars to upwards
of $100,000 or more, creator of clojure is working on typed clojure which is closed source.

the pendulum may be swinging from one side to the other now,
since time and energy and resources are limited, it would be too much to ask that people give up and give away their
work for free indefinitely, unless of course if that's what some people choose to do, shen allows it too.

in communism/socialism, people were expected to give away their hard work and labor for free for the greater good, in exchange for
the guarantee of basic needs such as housing, food, reliable transportation that the government would provide;
in capitalism, you're on your own in finding food, transportation and housing, but if you're able to come up with a good idea
and money to make the idea a reality, then you're rewarded with more than basic needs of food and housing, etc...

now with internet and open source, especially for those who devote their time and energy (limited resource) to programming,
you are expected to give away your hard work and ideas for free, receiving in return... NOTHING.
not only you're expected to give away your work for nothing, you are expected to keep giving... for nothing.

shen went open source recently, but that's not enough (according to the open sourcism), you have to keep giving for free
whatever you got left to give, whether it be dataflow/concurrency libary, or self-modifying code, or anything else of value
(FOR THE GREATER GOOD), because it's "UNETHICAL AND SELIFISH" for you not to do so, and how dare you even think
that not doing so might be a right thing to do? (according to the said open sourcism)

and who cares about your housing, food, and transportation needs? (RIGHT?)

in a less unideal world, there would be a university research grant type that one could apply for, and receive help with
one's basic needs for basic human decency, in exchange for a proposal that may show a promise of worthiness, instead of
just demanding that one just, give, give, give, for... NOTHING.

bill gates is donating millions in philanthropic gesture, that's great, if you can do, do so; but it's different when you're asking
someone to give away their last pair of shoes, for (again)... NOTHING.

dr. tarver says that whatever you make on top of shen is yours to do as you please, using any license of your choice,
and maybe he wants to exercise that freedom for himself as well, all the more power to him.

edsger dijkstra said that apl was a mistake that was carried out to perfection, if so then it is a very profitable mistake
that some people are enjoying, and shen is not a mistake, but there may be very little to nothing of any and all apl
that shen could not emulate, then the mistake would be in not exploring such gold mine of an opportunity more earnestly.

[Robert Herman]

I just received the second edition two weeks ago. When I ordered I didn't see anything about a soon-to-be-published third edition. Besides errata, what is the significance of the 10% difference? Too expensive to order the third edition so soon after laying out the cash for the second edition. Oh, well...

Rob

[Robert Herman]

FYI - The Shen site still links to the second edition.

[Mark Tarver]

Well my list provides the differences; so you can tell.  I think the gap between #1 and #2 is significantly wider than 2# and 3#.

TBoS 2nd edition is not printed now on my order; but copies may persist in the system for a time.

Mark

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[Mark Tarver]

I don't think it will affect your learning deeply.  Some things in the 3rd edition are better laid out.  I think particularly the chapter of controlling type checking and debugging using spy is a step forward bringing many elements together. And the new chapter including a comparison with ML is interesting.   But the fundamentals are still very much the same.

Willi jokes about a 4th edition but I very much doubt there will be.   It is pretty much 'there' in terms of what I intended it to do; it explains Shen clearly from top to bottom with hopefully as few mistakes as possible!.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

One your best posts fuzzy;  OS reminds me of a Ponzi scheme - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme if you need to look it up.  

Typically, extraordinary returns are promised on the original investment and vague verbal constructions .... might be used. The promoter sells shares to investors by taking advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, 

Once you see through it, it loses its power.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

thx; fixed

Mark

--

[s4]

Great discussion about open source, i've really enjoyed! Very exciting. There is Bakunin street in my city, now i know who he was :)

Dr. Tarver, you really should write more about it on your site (i mean in one place). I've got "403 Forbidden" when opened http://marktarver.com/ when tried to reread your articles (in case you don't know).

P.S.  So what about anarcho-syndicalism hacker's cooperative? Interesting theme.

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[Mark Tarver]

Thanks!

The idea that OS allows you to exploit people w.o. return was known and understood and approved of right from the inception of the movement.  Here is a passage from ESR's C&B

In fact, I think Linus’s cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.” 

C&B p. 6

This rather gives the game away!  OS allows people to benefit who are in the best position to realise market value - which may not be the people who carried the work.  What you have here is simply the appropriation of labour.  Though the appropriation of labour is not new, the means by which labour is appropriated change from generation to generation.

You know twice in the history of this project people have stepped in and tried to strip capital from this project, both mine and others, for selfish ends, and twice I've faced them down.  But you can't keep relying on one person.

                                                         

You will not realise the potential of Shen, or of collaborative working, unless you ditch the OS theme and divorce collaboration from OS.  You have to restore distributive justice and recognise and empower people and when you do that, the collaborative model works.  Then what you have got is a worker's cooperative.  Remember 'Shen' means 'spirit'.   

I began arguing this in 2013; (search "Programming as a profession" in that thread) but sadly programmers seem too afraid of negative reviews from reddit - or people criticising them and clung to OS!   You'll see there was little response.  There was a time when men risked prison fighting for their rights.   Now hackers cave in when freetards get shirty.  A different generation I guess.

>  P.S.  So what about anarcho-syndicalism hacker's cooperative? Interesting theme.

It depends on the people on the download page.  They prefer continuing with OS, I guess;  they're certainly quiet.   If you choose a workers' coop, it won't make much money at first, for sure, but gradually it will build and eventually the reddit world will look up and others will copy.  But Shenturians have to be bold enough and brave enough to want to lead.

I'll look at my site.  I've got to get back to my lectures.

Mark

[Raoul Duke]

Geeze. This whole anti-OS thing seems to be throwing the baby out with
the bath water. Sure everybody is free to do as they see fit (I hope)
so you can continue to be mean to those virtual babies all you want.

But come on.

There are and could well be ways to make the social outcomes be more
egalitarian. Just go look at the graphs of # of commits for any
project on github for example. Or the badges people earn on
stackoverflow.

OS has some good things about it. Accentuate the positive. Closed
source sucks. :-)

[Mark Tarver]

... which in no way addresses the social aspects raised.   Who gives a shit about badges?   I don't.  Not since I was 12.  Do you think I miss the boy scouts?   Do you think the first unionists could have been bought and distracted so easily.  Never mind comrade, sorry you cannot afford food, but hey here's a badge and 12 karma points from a guy in Arizona.  

Really, you couldn't make this up.

Mark 

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[Mark Thom]

Oh, I'm definitely soured on OS as any sort of business or development model. It just seems we have to work within the OS framework in order to win any sort of traction for Shen, because the license warriors will invariably divert all attention Shen receives onto the absence of an OS framework.

[Raoul Duke]

Some people value things other than money. And not all open source
things are getting rich. Really, I couldn't make up this utter
one-sided blindness on display here. (But, yes, maybe stackoverflow
*is* getting rich off of the contributions which lead to them being
able to make money off of advertisements. :-)

I don't disagree with the point that there are problems with OS, and I
appreciate your and others' critiques thereof. Yes, maybe there's not
as much clothing on the emperor as people have thought. (The current
Reddit thing is another example of how this goes down, how this has
often gone down in history; I've been there and done that same thing
with moderators at other companies/organizations.)

Yet, as somebody who has gone though higher CS education and also been
in the real software industry for longer than I care to admit (i.e.
decades) and worked both in closed and open source environments
(Hotwired, Microsoft, Stanford U, Agilent, to name a few ones people
might recognize off the top of their head) I know that there are many
things in the world which would never have happened were it not for
OS, and some of those things are important enough that I think we'd be
worse off without them.

Painting all OS as wrong and evil and grubbing is just patently absurd
if you think about it for a minute. So I'm railing against what I hear
on here as some kind of extremism against all of OS.

Should you care to temper things and point out pros and cons rather
than just (as it comes across to me, at any rate, and maybe I'm just
missing things that other people have seen as tempering in your
commentary) saying it is all a huge money grab, that would be more
true to life.

[deech]

Am I missing something? I thought Shen is OS.

-deech

[Mark Thom]

It is.

[Mark Tarver]

Let's get the closed source thing out of the way.

I'm sitting here, I'm using Sony Movie Studio, Powerpoint, Audacity and Word.  I know for certain three of them are closed source - and you know what?  I don't give a damn.  They are helping me to a position of independence and that will not involve OS.  All I care about is if they work and they do.  And I can mail a Sony hotline if I get stuck.  And I guarantee that no Sony employee will tell me to RTFM.   Closed sources sucks?  Not where I'm sitting, and that's where many people sit.   There is nothing inherently sucky about closed source and nothing inherently immoral about creating it.

Mark talks abut license warriors.  He's right.  So how do you contend with this?  You have to bring out your own inner warrior.  You get tough.  You have to act like and be class warriors and you don't take shit.  You have to see the justness of the principle of workers' cooperatives and fight for them.  Compared to what our ancestors faced, staves, imprisonment, force, a freetard on reddit with verbal diarrhoea is nothing. 

The appropriation of labour has been going on for millenia - and often by force, like the enclosures.  But force is the last resort.  If you can persuade people to allow their labour to be appropriated, if you can get inside their heads, then force is not needed.  Marxists call this false consciousness and that's why poor people end up voting for right wing governments.  And pretty much this is the case with OS.  A lot of money has gone into this lobby.  And a lot of programmers are now saddled with guilt about the whole closed source idea - job done.

Raoul says my criticism is bitchy.  You cannot criticise OS, because like, that's mean.  People do OS for other things than money; like OS is some sort of benign knitting circle of grannies.  But this misses the point, because the community moved past the point of saying software can be open to saying that it must be open and using intimidation to enforce it.   And people in this group are running scared of that;  "we musn't offend these license warriors by disagreeing with them", even though they've made no contribution and will not.  OS is now a subject beyond discussion in many circles. So this needs to be called out.  

You need collectively to think outside the accepted frame of reference that has been programmed into you.

Mark

[Raoul Duke]

hi,

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Let's get the closed source thing out of the way.
> I'm sitting here, I'm using Sony Movie Studio, Powerpoint, Audacity and
> Word. I know for certain three of them are closed source - and you know
> what? I don't give a damn. They are helping me to a position of
> independence and that will not involve OS. All I care about is if they work
> and they do. And I can mail a Sony hotline if I get stuck. And I guarantee
> that no Sony employee will tell me to RTFM. Closed sources sucks? Not
> where I'm sitting, and that's where many people sit. There is nothing
> inherently sucky about closed source and nothing inherently immoral about
> creating it.

I agree that I am the pot; I was saying "closed source sucks", and
that is as bad as other people saying "os sucks" when there's no
further talk about the pros and cons.

What I meant was not that closed source is evil in some "i drink the
OS kool-aid" sense. I meant that there are plenty of things that suck
about closed source. Sure, the are possibly good things about it as
well (i.e. making a living off of it). But there's still lots that is
painful about it vs. OS which is one of the reasons OS took off. Yes,
the "free" as in "beer" thing helped a LOT with making OS take off,
and that might be the single most important thing about why it got
successful -- but on the other hand, go look at "pay what you want"
campaigns. (Also, as an aside, "free" is very different than even "1
penny", it is much more attractive.)

> The appropriation of labour has been going on for millenia - and often by
> force, like the enclosures. But force is the last resort. If you can
> persuade people to allow their labour to be appropriated, if you can get
> inside their heads, then force is not needed. Marxists call this false
> consciousness and that's why poor people end up voting for right wing
> governments. And pretty much this is the case with OS. A lot of money has
> gone into this lobby. And a lot of programmers are now saddled with guilt
> about the whole closed source idea - job done.

Yes, I agree with being wary of people taking advantage of the labor
of others. But I do not see OS as being inherently purely solely that.
Some projects might have started that way, some might have become that
on way or another, but I think there are still plenty of things about
OS and about projects done that way that are benefits. Benefits that
we *tend* not to get with closed source, but not that closed source
*has some competition* people are being forced to find middle grounds.
(Overall, one thing I majorly hate is when there is no competition.)

> Raoul says my criticism is bitchy. You cannot criticise OS, because like,
> that's mean.

Oy veh. I'm just saying that it feels like there is a failure here to
recognize any of the advantages of OS.

> People do OS for other things than money; like OS is some sort
> of benign knitting circle of grannies. But this misses the point, because
> the community moved past the point of saying software can be open to saying
> that it must be open and using intimidation to enforce it.

There are lots of dynamics involved in the world, in markets (as much
as I distrust it when people take a "dismal science" approach).
Consider Apple where nigh nothing is open source -- richest effing
business on earth, no? Or, again, stuff like the Humbe Indie Bundles.
Or Community vs. Enhanced editions. Or Freemium things. Or whatever
else people dream up and find traction with.

So there's no single "community" here. If you define "community" to be
those who are militant OS people then sure you can have your tautology
and eat it, too.

> And people in
> this group are running scared of that; "we musn't offend these license
> warriors by disagreeing with them", even though they've made no contribution
> and will not. OS is now a subject beyond discussion in many circles. So
> this needs to be called out.

That's a different topic than what I was trying to address. I'm happy
for people to disagree about licensing. (But, hey, if you are at all
rational and at all living in the real modern world, you will
recognize that licenses are tricky things, and YANAL and even if YAAL
then you still might get it wrong and get sued to hell and back.)

> You need collectively to think outside the accepted frame of reference that
> has been programmed into you.

Yes, sure, great, I'm very much completely seriously happier for
people to say that, than to kow-tow to things. But just because we
have to think for ourselves doesn't mean whatever paradigm(s) are in
the majority are 110% pure evil with nothing to be learned or salvaged
or appreciated about them. Doing so seems to me to be just as
"programmed". (Unless, of course, it actually *is* 110% evil ;-)

sincerely.

[Mark Tarver]

that is as bad as other people saying "os sucks" when there's no further talk about the pros and cons. 

OS doesn't need me - or you - to praise it.  OS has been massively oversold for over a decade.   The hype could float a fleet of zeppelins.  OS instead needs to be deconstructed, and myth needs to be separated from reality.  

So you have to reduce it to rubble and in the rubble you have to look for the useful materials that went into its construction.  Brotherhood, freedom, self-worth, non-exploitation, sharing, cooperation between equals - all good things.  But the property of open source?   Hardly,  these are the ideals that would equally drive a cooperative based on worker ideals.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

And that's about all from me from me for now; because I want to concentrate on other things. 

Mark

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[Raoul Duke]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> OS doesn't need me - or you - to praise it. OS has been massively oversold
> for over a decade. The hype could float a fleet of zeppelins. OS instead
> needs to be deconstructed, and myth needs to be separated from reality.
> So you have to reduce it to rubble and in the rubble you have to look for
> the useful materials that went into its construction. Brotherhood, freedom,
> self-worth, non-exploitation, sharing, cooperation between equals - all good
> things. But the property of open source? Hardly, these are the ideals
> that would equally drive a cooperative based on worker ideals.

It is strange. I really do agree with what you are saying overall
here. But I do not see that the logical conclusion is that -- again as
it looked to me so far on this list, and I might have just utterly
missed the qualifiers along the way -- we cannot say anything other
than that OS is evil. Or that *all* OS is evil in the same way, if at
all.

[Mark Tarver]

But I do not see that the logical conclusion is that --... *all* OS is evil.

To agree with the argument and then substitute a conclusion of your own making only to reject it is not really to answer what has been put.

Mark

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[Raoul Duke]

> But I do not see that the logical conclusion is that --... *all* OS is evil.
>
> To agree with the argument and then substitute a conclusion of your own
> making only to reject it is not really to answer what has been put.

Have you ever wondered if it is possible for somebody to agree
*partially* with another person's point of view? :-)

[Mark Tarver]

"Yes, but ..." without any real counterclaim doesn't help the cause you want to defend.  You may feel impelled to disagree, and you may not like OS being given a pounding here, but w.o. any strong argument, your partial agreement becomes an observation of your personal psychology.  You have the right to state it; but it loses force.

[tycho luyben]

Still not sure what the goal is here? Wether you do or do not like closed source; it's a philosophy but also a marketing tool. All examples you come up with are not less valid for open source than for closed source; open source doesn't mean you don't get support; it would be a very valid way for Shen Ltd to make actual money even. No bigger company will install Shen without support so they will take that $x.xxx/year subscription when they can get it from Shen Ltd, the makers of the language, libs and infra. What is the difference with closed source there? That you CAN use some products without paying anyone anything doesn't mean you should if you don't like going onto IRC and getting RTFM remarks and, even more so, companies won't use software without support open or closed. 

If furthering Shen (and making the people involved earn a living from it) is the goal what is the point of OS vs CS without a clear plan how to get there? Only after that plan is there the merits of different forms can be discussed. Making some kind of collective under a Shen Ltd kind of construction would, at least in my mind, not change the outlook for either OS or CS. It would actually allow more uptake of the language once the marketing machine is in place when using OS. But until there is a plan what steps to take how can waypoints to the goal be under fire already? 

[Raoul Duke]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 1:35 AM, Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Yes, but ..." without any real counterclaim doesn't help the cause you want
> to defend. You may feel impelled to disagree, and you may not like OS being
> given a pounding here, but w.o. any strong argument, your partial agreement
> becomes an observation of your personal psychology. You have the right to
> state it; but it loses force.

I fail to agree that we should admit only absolutist/extremist
standings. That appears most often to really be simply unthinking
tyranny at the root. You have your right to attempt to be a tyrant,
but it loses face.

[Mark Tarver]

> Still not sure what the goal is here?

Clearing the air?  Banishing illusion?  Getting people to think out of the box a bit?

Well if all that works out it would be very nice.  But let's look at this more closely from the money view.

What you are proposing; a radical overhaul and extension of the libraries is a lot of work.  where does the money come in here?  The model is

Joe does a lot of work and

   if Shen gains traction and so

     if a corporation takes Shen up and

        if it decides to pay support and 

           if that money goes to Joe in part or whole

              then Joe gets paid

              

You've got 4 layers of parentheses between doing a shed load of work and being remunerated.  That's not very enticing.   I can't see anybody who is money smart going down that route where there are plenty of other things one can do and get paid for sure.   

Mark

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[Mark Tarver]

I have no more power than anybody on this thread and no power to control Shen which is BSD.  But I do have the power to express my thought directly and simply.   That is not tyranny.   That is democracy.  And it is not unthinking.

[Raoul Duke]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 12:34 PM, Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no more power than anybody on this thread and no power to control
> Shen which is BSD. But I do have the power to express my thought directly
> and simply. That is not tyranny. That is democracy. And it is not
> unthinking.

We seem to be always talking across one another.

My point was not that you should not make your points. I do not see
you as utterly unthinking.

My point was that you claimed when I say "yes, but" then my arguments
have failed. I do not agree with that perspective at all. Not even
enough to say "yes, but". It is flat-out wrong.

So when you have your view of SO and then I point out that (a) you
didn't mention the good parts and (b) you aren't a lawyer so your
home-grown license was simply inept, you seem to claim that my points
are flaccid.

Now, there is a lot I agree with in what you have written. I've been
through academia. I know people still in it. I've been in industry. I
know people still in it. All your initial complaints make sense to me
and I pretty much concur --- right up until the point where you are
nigh literally throwing the baby out with the bath water as I
originally said. From what you have written to date, it all strikes me
as some subtle blend of cluelessness, extremism,
mad-at-the-world-la-la-la-i'm-not-listening, irrationality, and
wishful thinking.

Yes, please do continue to try to change the world, or at least parts
of it. Do not stop, you have obviously contributed more than I (ever
will). But it really seems sad and weird to me that you seem to me to
be refusing to acknowledge there might be good things to learn from
SO.

sincerely.

[Raoul Duke]

> You've got 4 layers of parentheses between doing a shed load of work and
> being remunerated. That's not very enticing. I can't see anybody who is
> money smart going down that route where there are plenty of other things one
> can do and get paid for sure.

?!

Welcome to the Real World. Some people are willing to go out on limbs,
for whatever personal reasons. Others aren't. I do not see that
there's anything inherently wrong with that. Sure, I'd like the world
to beat a path to my door to buy my comic books, but I do not believe
that is some inherent right that must be fulfilled by the universe on
my behalf. So, gosh, I have a "day job".

[Mark Tarver]

 it all strikes me as some subtle blend of cluelessness, extremism, mad-at-the-world-la-la-la-i'm-not-listening, irrationality, and wishful thinking.

Is there an argument somewhere in all this?    I'm trying to find one.  There seems nothing for me to respond to; so perhaps you need to continue the discussion with somebody else.

Mark   

[Mark Tarver]

And this really will be my last post whatever is said here.

My personal feelings of Tycho's plans are - I hope they succeed!  My business analysis is as follows.

If you have a big cost C and a product of steep improbabilities p1 x p2 ... x pn followed by a return R then decision theory will tell you that this is not likely to be a sensible investment of your assets unless R is very big indeed.   People do invest in this sort of thing if C is small (like buying a lottery ticket) because writing off a £ is nothing.  However writing off six months or a year of effort is different.   

I suppose the presupposition is that R = millions of dollars.  But fact the analysis of the value of R wrt open source consultancy gives a much more modest picture of the expected utility.  A more typical picture is given here.  In addition studies have shown that OS consultancies typically lose about 17% of their client base per year through turnover and have to recruit hard to stay still.  This means that R is unlikely to be megabucks.

But there's nothing wrong in chasing your dream as long as it is either your labour on the roulette table or those of people who understand what is involved.

And that really is it for me - a stimulating and lively discussion that must go on without me.

Mark

[Kean Lau]

My copy of the Book of Shen was finally delivered!

In one of the earlier editions of the TBoS (I think the 1st edition?) there was a chapter on implementing a LCF style proof assistant. It seems that chapter wasn't popular and got dropped for the 3rd edition? That's a shame I was looking forward to reading it.

[Mark Tarver]

It was rather too specialised; but you will not be disappointed.  There is a chapter incorporating how to code a Hilbert style proof assistant for a Hilbert style proof system for PC - p 251-256.  LPC contains a chapter on writing tactics.

Mark

[Bruno Deferrari]

I was just reading what David R. MacIver posted on his blog and wanted
to share here because it is quite relevant to what was discussed on
this thread (re: opensource, development sustainability, etc)

http://www.drmaciver.com/2015/08/throwing-in-the-towel/

```
I’ve been trying to figure out a way of making Hypothesis development
sustainable, and the answer is basically that I can’t, despite the
fact that it’s clearly going to save people at the bare minimum
millions of dollars over the course of its lifetime.

Yeah, I could probably eke out a living. Particularly if I was
prepared to burn a lot of bridges and sacrifice most of what actually
makes me want to work on it, but basically we’ve built an industry on
free labour, and we’ve concluded that we’d much rather make people
work for free in their spare time to produce adequate software and
shame them into supporting it when somehow it surprisingly doesn’t do
exactly what we want than fairly compensate for their labour and get
good software out of it.

This makes any attempt to get money for tooling such an uphill
struggle that it’s really not worth the effort. Plans which are
predicated on changing the world before anyone will pay you any money
are decidedly bad plans.
```

--
BD

[Mark Tarver]

Human beings, groups and even countries, often evolve at the point of crisis.   A crisis can be a time of great opportunity!   I'm very busy right now with founding a new line, but when I've worked through what I need to do, I'll return to tackling this - but in a new thread.  

Mark