The Shen language was shaped by illness and rejection

I have become interested in the Shen language. While reading the “history” page, I notice that illness and death play a large role, and also rejection of new ideas by audiences which misunderstand the speaker:

The appearance of Qi was swiftly followed by a serious illness that laid me up for 2006 and most of 2007. Following a partial recovery in 2008, a factorising version of the Qi compiler was introduced which made Qi competitive with the fastest hand-compiled Lisp code. The revised language, Qi II, corresponding to the text Functional Programming in Qi was released in 2008

The 4th iteration: Shen

The chain of events that precipitated Shen began with an invitation to address the European Conference on Lisp in Milan in 2009. The invitation came about because the invited speaker, Kent Pitman, had been himself taken ill with cancer which meant, understandably, that he had to withdraw. I was invited to take his place.

Ironically I was ill too and at first declined, since I was healing at that time. But the organiser was frantic and I finally accepted. My address proposed a language like Qi but based on a primitive instruction set that was so small that it could be translated onto almost any platform. Qi had been implemented in Common Lisp, which has over 700 system functions. But of that large number, Qi only used 118 system functions in its implementation.

I estimated that Qi could be implemented in an even smaller instruction set of less than 50 primitive functions, and that they should be so carefully chosen as to be easily implemented and widely portable. This instruction set defined a very simple Lisp, closer in spirit to Lisp 1.5, the original Lisp from which the gargantuan Common Lisp descended. This micro-Lisp was later to be called KLambda.

This idea was the subject of my talk at the conference, but it was ignored since my criticisms of Common Lisp were not well received. Feeling I was wasting my time, I left computer science in 2009 and journeyed to India. Shen therefore remained a dream until my partner Dr Pamesa called me back and asked that I complete the work. She died before this was done.

In 2010 an appeal was launched to fund this research and happily it succeeded. Armed with some means of subsistence, I returned to designing and building the new implementation during 2011. Eventually what emerged in September 2011 was a clean, portable language under a $free license, implemented in 43 primitive KLambda instructions running initially under Common Lisp. The new language was named Shen, the highest form of energy in Taoism and the Chinese for spirit.