end of year report

[Mark Tarver]

We are coming to the end of another year.  But this year, 2016, has been a year of great progress for Shen.  It is worth looking back, not only on this year, but on the history of Shen.  We need to remind ourselves of what we have accomplished together.

It was six years ago, on behest of my deceased partner, that I returned from the edge of the Himalayas to complete the work on Shen that needed to be done.  Shen was a product of one mind but not of one hand.  Without your financial support from 2010-2012, and I single out our Russian friends in particular, Shen would not have been built.  

And following its release many more programmers - from Russia, from Uruguay, from America and elsewhere came together to port Shen.  So now we have Shen under Common Lisp, Clojure, Emacs Lisp, Java, Javascript, Python, Scheme, Haskell, Ruby and perhaps soon C or C++.  It is a unique achievement that no other group can match.  Shen has lived up to its title of 'spirit' meaning that it exists as a specification that can inhabit different bodies.  Only a collective effort could realise the great potential of Shen to transcend the boundaries of programming languages, since no single programmer could be expected to master so many different tongues.  

We have also felt the influence of the darker aspects, jealousy and anger, which threatened the project, and which culminated in the ugly Wikipedia incident of 2015. In this world it is impossible to stand alone for any idea of significance without attracting jealousy or hate. In no way should we let these forces delay our progress.  We simply ignore them or, when they need to be countered, dispose of them efficiently.

The period that is now closing has been one of the most progressive since the early days of the project.  In 2016 Shen Professional acquired concurrency, graphics and web capability amongst other features.  We have moved the bulk of the work to the cloud, and of December 2016, SP runs under Windows and Linux.  

All the objectives of this phase have been achieved with the support of our sponsors.  So a big thank you to them and again a thumbs up because achieving goals within time is always a bonus in software engineering.

However with the end of one phase is the beginning of a next, and in my next email I will lay down the second phase of our work.  The work that is to begin in 2017.

Mark

[fuzzy wozzy]

nice to see a post on google group kdb for q language that a book, q for mortals 3, is freely available
on code.kx.com since a few days ago, only an older edition was available for years, maybe a few chapters
at first, then later full text, but the new edition that was released a year ago was available on amazon, but
never an open text until now... quite an altruistic and philanthropic gesture on the part of the author, I would say,

array programming is here to say, I think, as long as there's a need for numeric computing of some kind,
but more so with problems involving set theory and group theory, as well

object oriented and imperative languages are useful for numerical stuff too, but array languages can be valuable for problems
that they're well suited for, too...

all this to segue into how it's good that shen is getting into array paradigm recently, actually shen always had it,
even back in the qi days, using nothing more than list, it was perfectly well suited for such, only it wasn't given much
attention until now... good that it is now.

[fuzzy wozzy]

this may not be on anybody's top priority list when it comes to porting shen but personally I'd love to see shen ported to basic4gl,
it might be a good way for shen to enter into graphics field including animation and illustration, and gl is very much respected in
the graphics field, just a wishful thinking, I know...

[Mark Tarver]

Somebody did discuss this with me over private email.

Mark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Shen" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qilang+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to qil...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/qilang.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[fuzzy wozzy]

there are some things often mentioned and praised in the way of q language such as how q's power comes from
its column based database system, and how q can handle regular shaped database as well as irregular shaped ones,
such as instead of a database of shape 5 x 5, 5 rows by 5 columns, one row might be 3 or 7 or what ever,

and my favorite, the depth search possibility, say, given something like, [a b [c [d e [f h]]]], depth search can find [f h]
for example, and all these things are laughably simple to do in shen,

those keen on the q's development from its earlier form of k might remember how k was way more cryptic and q improved
on the readability by introducing many keywords that made k's cryptic code unnecessary, and giving out q commands to
read more like an english sentence that does something useful was very much appreciated, it almost looked reminiscent of
what cobol code might have looked like in the old days, which is not a bad thing at all and perhaps shen could be ported to
any one of the many of the cobol implementations out there, who's to say...

[Mark Tarver]

and how q can handle regular shaped database as well as irregular shaped ones,
such as instead of a database of shape 5 x 5, 5 rows by 5 columns, one row might be 3 or 7 or what ever, 

Jagged arrays are easy in Shen.

those keen on the q's development from its earlier form of k might remember how k was way more cryptic and q improved on the readability by introducing many keywords that made k's cryptic code unnecessary, and giving out q commands to read more like an english sentence that does something useful was very much appreciated, it almost looked reminiscent of what cobol code might have looked like in the old days, which is not a bad thing at all and perhaps shen could be ported to any one of the many of the cobol implementations out there, who's to say...

Again one can do this in Shen with macros; but making code more like English makes your stuff very prolix. 

Mark