Computer Science
Scientific Work
I'm best known for the
functional language Shen; The Book of
Shen (third edition) is the canonical text. Probably the
most concise summary of Shen is in this appeal of 2013. There is
a Shen language website from which you can
download Shen, and this includes an open source manual. The Shen News Group exists for Shen and
we have over 500 subscribers. There is also
a Shen under Twitter and a Shen wiki run by good people.
Being of the old fart generation, I actually
don't contribute much to these, but don't let
that stop you.
If you're really keen on
learning the history of this research, Shen was a
portable development of a predecessor language Qi
which is described in this invited talk of
2008, Lisp for the C21 (.wmv
file).
There was also this talk which predated Shen
- The Next Lisp. The old web site for Qi was
Lambda Associates which exists on the Shen site
as an archive,
During the brief Indian
summer of my time as a lecturer, I taught
discrete mathematics at Stony Brook to first year
computer science students. My notes eventually
shaped themselves into a text Logic, Proof and
Computation.
Popular (and
unpopular) Essays
I wrote a series of essays
on various topics connected with education and
writing software:
- The Bipolar Lisp
Programmer: this was an essay which
came from my experience as a lecturer of
watching brilliant students fail. I've
been scolded on the use of 'bipolar' in
this article. If you Google this title
you'll find an extended discussion.
- Why I am not a
Professor: this was my equivalent to
Robert Graves Goodbye to All
That which he described as his
"bitter leave-taking of
England". This was my bitter
leave-taking of academia; the tone is
deservedly bleak. If you Google this
you'll find discussion too.
- In Defence of Open
Science: this was prompted by a
deletionist removal of my work from
Wikipedia. I didn't put my stuff on
Wikipedia, but the resulting bizarre
discussion prompted me to write this
piece.
- The Shen of Shen: a
series of aphorisms derived from Taoism
and martial arts on programming as an
art.
The next three were my take
on the absurdities of the open source movement.
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