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Comment by 616c | Hacker News Reader

So true. I am watching this video and I am very impressed. I am a novice programmer, but from what I read on HN the Shen system hits all cylinders a lot of the more powerful advanced programming paradigms. I am a Shen outsider and there seems to be some much overhead that is not technical when I read about it and it upsets me bc, well, it is a work of art.

I just started studying Java, and found the yet to be certified Java implementation. I am afraid to look at it, lest brains come of my nose.

https://github.com/hraberg/Shen.java

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One of the great advantages of Shen is that it is built on top of a very simple Lisp called KL of which you can (at least basically working) implement an interpreter or compiler in any language in a day. And when you did that, Shen will run on it. That's why there are so many targets and that's why most targets are not mature. I find it a great advantage though; you can make a compiler or runtime embedded in whatever you are doing really fast and then optimise it as you go.

Edit: I would say, if you want to practice on implementing a compiler & runtime (or VM with JIT or LLVM frontend etc) KL is a good place to start. It's so easy (again, to get something working; to optimise etc is obviously just as painful as with any other language implementation) that it is a lot of fun and you learn a lot if you never did it before.

Is there any good introductory info on K lambda? I did some quick Googling and Wikipedia searching, I did not find a singular article about this, not general lamdba calculus or something useful to a complete novice like me.

I think this from the Shen site describes it: http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/shendoc.htm#Kl

Yes, you would use that doc to implement it and then the Shen distribution to test if it works as expected. Unlike Shen, K lambda is quite a simple Lisp implementation, if you know a bit of Lisp it should all look pretty straight forward. It doesn't have any advanced stuff built in; that's all done on top.

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