3. History
TBoS p 27-32, p 494-500
SD
Shen owes its origins to work done in the 90s by Mark Tarver on applying high
performance automated reasoning techniques to the problem of type checking programs.
The first version of the work SEQUEL
(SEQUEnt processing Language)
premiered at the 1993 International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence under the title 'A
Language for Implementing Arbitrary Logics'. Subsequently
the language went through a cycle of development before
emerging in 2005 as Qi. As with SEQUEL, Qi was written in
Common Lisp. Qi was presented in 2008 under the title
Lisp for the C21 Century and at the European Conference
on Lisp in 2009. In the latter address Tarver suggested
that Qi could be implemented with an instruction set much
smaller than the 118 Common Lisp system functions used to
implement the language. The resulting language could be
ported over a much wider range of platforms than Common
Lisp.
In 2010 Vasil Diadov and other sponsors put up the capital to make this experiment
happen. The result was the Shen kernel; delivered in 2011
and implemented in 43 (later 46) primitive functions
under Common Lisp that defined a miniature Lisp called
Kλ. Kλ was defined in what became the first standard for
the new language; Shendoc 1.7. The latest standard is
Shendoc 30.
Following the introduction of Shen in 2011, the language was rapidly
ported to Scheme, Python, Clojure, Javascript, the JVM,
Haskell and Emacs Lisp. The first book on Shen was
published in 2012 and went through three revisions issuing
in
The Book of Shen 4th edition in
2021. This text is generally known as TBoS. The
Shen kernel also went open source in February 2015.
In September 2015, another group of investors supported Tarver in forking
the kernel to form the basis of a more extensive system
with commercial applications. This version, Shen
Professional (SP), added concurrency, graphics, better
compilation, web connection and extended libraries to an
upgraded kernel. Shen ran on the freemium model;
with the kernel being OS and the enhanced SP available by
subscription from 2017 onwards.
In 2021 the SP kernel was
returned to open source forming the basis for the S series of kernels on
which this manual is based. In late 2024, all the code in SP was open sourced
and SP was discontinued.
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