Thank you for the link to the talk! I'll watch it for sure.

If I am interesting in using functional languages (currently F#, Elixir, and Racket) to explore GUI systems, graphics, symbolic math, numerical computing like machine learning and swarm algorithms and automatic differentiation, agent-based modeling, fractals and general chaos theory stuff, etc., is Shen a good match for that type of exploratory, almost from first principles but towards something that is actually usable work?

Is Shen closer to Scheme or Lisp? I typically fall in the Scheme side of things a la Racket.

Thanks for all the information and help!