Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shen (programming language)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. There are several !votes by SPA editors. While being a SPA does not necessarily mean that a !vote will be ignored, in this case, none of the SPA !votes appears to be policy based. None of the "keep" !votes come up with a reliable source covering the subject in-depth, all seem to be basically WP:ILIKEIT. In contrast, the "delete" !votes are policy-based and hence carry the day. Randykitty (talk) 13:04, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Shen (programming language)

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Every single source offered is WP:PRIMARY and thus unsuitable. Googling turned up nothing useful. This article has been tagged for COI, notability and primary sources for almost 3 years. Msnicki (talk) 10:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * keep Shen is an important step in language development, even if now a deliberately unimportant language. It would be a negative effect on WP (Shen doesn't care) to remove coverage of it from WP.
 * Sourcing is awkward as, as with so many modern topics in CS, that coverage is mostly in the sort of on-line sources that WP has set itself against (although this never seems to limit articles on web comics). Mike Fogus' blog http://blog.fogus.me/?s=shen explains some of the Shen issues and Fogus ought to be considered as RS for functional languages.
 * The article here is currently poor. It fails to explain the major limitation on Shen, its licensing. Tarver's strict policy on licensing against forking development has seriously limited Shen development by others, or in other directions. As a result, pretty much all coverage of Shen will be from 2011 and it's a dead language beyond that point. IMHO, the licence restrictions killed the project. However it's not a non-notable corpse. Coverage of developments in programming language theory should include Qi and Shen. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh, and I see that you're now going for a third AfD nomination against Qi: WP:Articles for deletion/Qi (programming language) (3rd nomination)
 * Keep trying! I'm sure you'll catch that pesky wabbit someday. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:10, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * A couple questions, Andy: Where are the reliable independent sources?  Or in the alternative, what do you rely in the guidelines that supports notability without sources?  Every one of the reasons you've given seems to be a reason why the article should be deleted, not kept.  Msnicki (talk) 11:20, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * (Note that the following is a wild guess:) I think I know why, besides the licensing, Qi and Shen have been entirely uninfluential, thereby failing to achieve Wikipedia notability: there's little that's qualitatively unique about them except for implementation details. They are explicitly intended to be modern functional languages, adding a number of features where Lisp hasn't kept up in any base version of the language.  And Shen's KL is akin to the SECD machine. Hga (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. N ORTH A MERICA 1000 18:00, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment. Here's the problem I have with the argument that the work represents "an important step in language development".  No one's argued anyone's using Qi or Shen and the author, Mark Tarver, is an academic, so I'm inclined to  test the claim of importance in the way we often do in academia, which is to ask how often the work has been cited.  Here's a Google scholar search on Tarver's papers.  His paper on Qi has received only 3 citations and his paper on Shen has received only 2.  Drilling down, three of those combined 5 citations are by Tarver himself, leaving these papers with only one citation each by anyone other than the author.  Within the STEM disciplines, a significant paper is generally understood to be one that receives over 1000 citations.  Qi and Shen are not only not important, almost no one's even noticed they exist.  Msnicki (talk) 20:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC).


 * Strong delete The spiritual successor of Qi and even less notable. There don't seem to be any sources other than those authored by the languages designer. —Ruud 10:11, 1 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment. Ideally I would argue for merging into the Qi article, but as Andy Dingley notes, and I'll extend, at best wonky licencing has caused these languages to be stillborn.  The first version of Qi was GPL, but the author found that unsatisfactory and for the 2nd version made a custom license that e.g. required owning a copy of a page in the Qi book to make closed source commercial use of the language, with the obvious problem of the book eventually going out of print, as it did.  Shen was less restrictively licensed, but the license was much more complex.  A recent campaign that netted £2500 to BSD license it didn't actually result in a clean, unmodified BSD license, resulting in hard feelings that further harmed the tiny Shen community.  So I can't argue for notability now or in the future :-(, unless someone gets inspired by them and creates another language, which, if it becomes notable, could then include Qi and Shen history in its history. Hga (talk) 13:59, 1 March 2015 (UTC)


 * keep The comments about the Shen license change not resulting in a clean, unmodified BSD seem to be wrong. The license file at http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.pdf states the license is "a 3 clause BSD license from 2015" and includes the license text. Additional commentary on the authors own opinions of various licenses is separated from the license text with "Comments on BSD, GPL and Copyright" and is not part of the license itself. Shen has received coverage in two published books, Logic, Proof and Computation and The Book of Shen. The Clever, Classless and Free talk by Håkan Råberg references Shen and Aditya Siram presented Shen, a sufficiently advanced lisp at the Strange Loop conference. Numerous implementations of Shen exist from third parties not associated with the original Shen author. Yofsotsi (talk) 03:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Both books are self-published books by the language's designer and thus do not help to establish notability. —Ruud 12:57, 3 March 2015 (UTC)


 * strong keep Shen is different from Qi. For one it has a different set of primitives from Qi. It's a successor in the same sense SBCL is a successor of CMUCL and they have their own entries. Furthermore it has transitioned to a BSD license. The comments regarding licence made by Hga are no longer applicable. — 68.184.193.46 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 01:57, 7 March 2015 (UTC).


 * "Furthermore it has transitioned to a BSD license." Operative word there is 'a', as in "a BSD licence", see for yourself one version of the modifications (the master license.pdf as distributed by the sources hasn't actually been changed since the first release, but it's still modified in the same style).  It does no one any good to pretend this is a clean BSD license when anyone can see that's not the case by downloading it.  And my greater point that wonky licencing caused Qi and Shen to be stillborn still holds.  Maybe the license change will result in significant uptake and eventual notability, but that's not true now.  If that happens the Shen Wikipedia page can be reborn.  Hga (talk) 11:16, 7 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I totally respect that you're entitled to your opinion, 68.184.193.46, based on the reasons you cite. Unfortunately, they do not address the one issue we consider at AfD, which is the notability of the subject.  Everything else is a content issue to be decided elsewhere, assuming we keep the page.  Under our guidelines, we define notability in a more technical way than might be common in ordinary usage.  Here on WP, it's not enough that a subject seems notable or that we feel it should be notable.  Instead, we require that others not connected to the subject must have taken note and that they have done it reliable sources, which we define as those with reputations for fact-checking and editorial control.  This is what we don't have here and why I've argued for deletion.  I note that Tarver indicates there are 467 of you in his newsgroup.  All that's required to establish notability would be if at least 2 of you not named Tarver could write some short articles about Shen and get them published somewhere.  Why not just do that?  In the meantime, you may certainly request the page be WP:USERFIED while you continue to look for (or create) sources.  Msnicki (talk) 18:36, 7 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Are the Clever, Classless and Free talk by Håkan Råberg and the one that Aditya Siram presented Shen, a sufficiently advanced lisp at the Strange Loop conference not sufficient as "2 of you not named Tarver" presenting something about Shen? They are not articles but Strange Loop is a well known conference. Yofsotsi (talk) 01:00, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * You're right. They're not articles.  More specifically, they're not what we consider WP:RS reliable sources.  You really need to get something published in a journal or a magazine or something, not just presented somewhere.  Techie magazines are always looking for material.  Propose some articles to them.  I suggested this in the 2nd Qi AfD three years ago and I'm a little surprised this seems so difficult.  Otoh, if it really is that difficult, I think you have your answer as to why I question whether this is a notable subject.  Msnicki (talk) 02:25, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * From WP:RS it seems that video is fine as a published source "However, audio, video, and multimedia materials that have been recorded then broadcast, distributed, or archived by a reputable party may also meet the necessary criteria to be considered reliable sources." The question then becomes if Strange Loop and InfoQ are considered reliable sources.Yofsotsi (talk) 03:23, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think developer conferences like Strange Loop and InfoQ accept talk based purely on a submitted abstract, or by invitation based on past performance of the speaker. As such the have little to no control over the content and thus wouldn't rank as particularly reliable due to lack of any review. For establishing notability it's a start, but one or two conferences in total still doesn't meet the criteria (I'm pretty sure we don't have an article on the vast majority of topic discussed in one talk at a developer's conference.) —Ruud 10:20, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, Yofsotsi, a video can be acceptable. But what's contemplated is a video by a WP:RELIABLE source.  A video segment from 60 Minutes is one thing; CBS News stands behind those and while even they occasionally get things wrong, we can all agree they have a reputation for fact-checking and editorial control.  A YouTube video, an obviously WP:Self-published source is quite another.  Msnicki (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Nakon  05:07, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I should introduce myself; I am Dr Willi Riha, formerly lecturer in comparative programming languages at the university of Leeds.


 * First I agree with you that the license question, which seems to be something of an obsession with HGA, is a blind with respect to the question of notability raised on these pages. As a matter of fact, Shen is under 3-clause BSD and has been since February this year.


 * I can say that Shen is not 'still born' (Dingley) or dead and that I have written and am still writing a significant body of work in it; work that in some cases I could not have pursued in ML; an example being the construction of a type secure proof assistant based on Bourbaki's formalisation of PC. HGA's characterisation of Shen as having 'little that's qualitatively unique' is malicious.  We also have a team of people working on implementations under half a dozen languages.  Finally Greg Spurrier is writing an introduction to Shen in Asciidoc.   I am working on concurrent Shen right now.  Shen is far from dead.


 * I am not an expert on the notability criteria of wikipedia or the question of primary sources. The Shen group has relied heavily on Mark Tarver's written documentation which is excellent and very thorough.  So much so that it has deterred people from writing their own, though this is now changing.  I know that Mark has encouraged people to step out of his shadow, and I hope with the new license this will happen.   I would have thought that Aditya's talk on Shen at the StrangeLoop conference in 2014 should have sufficed in itself to remove the question of notability.


 * WP:notability says


 * The term "published" is most commonly associated with text materials, either in traditional printed format or online. However, audio, video, and multimedia materials that have been recorded then broadcast, distributed, or archived by a reputable party may also meet the necessary criteria to be considered reliable sources.


 * As Mark has pointed out, there are articles in Wikipedia on languages like Brainfuck and Malbolge which have far less following or use than Shen.


 * I think that there are enough people in the Shen group to rewrite this stub without Mark having to violate Wikipedia guidelines by editing the article himself. I vote for a strong keep. — Note: An editor has expressed a concern that Williriha (talk • contribs) has been canvassed to this discussion.  — Williriha (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 13:53, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * "HGA's characterisation of Shen as having 'little that's qualitatively unique'" is a wild guess signaled by the weasel words "I think I know why", working from the observed facts and trying to figure out why Qi/Shen have made no apparent impact on the programming languages community, which might be expected to use some of its ideas if they were unique. That guess has resulted in no reply other than insult, plus now the above observation that it can do things that Williriha cannot (easily) do in ML.  If I'm wrong, I would be interested in specifics about qualitative things that make it unique beyond implementation details, like it being a Lisp. Hga (talk) 22:21, 8 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Dr. Riha, as an academic, surely you understand what it means to publish. It doesn't mean posting on YouTube.  It usually means you got your paper published in some kind of reviewed publication.  Our standards aren't even that high.  All we ask is that you got published in a source with a reputation for fact-checking and editorial control.  If you or anyone else is indeed doing some interesting work with Shen, surely some of you must have an incentive to publish something on the topic.  Once you do, that will contribute to the notability of Shen in a way we can consider.  When do you think that might happen?  In the meantime, you are welcome to WP:USERFY the page.  Msnicki (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * With respect, I think you are missing the point. The question of the academic originality/academic notability of Shen is not an issue to be decided in Wikipedia.  My intercession was made to answer your statement 'No one's argued anyone's using Qi or Shen'.  Well that has been addressed.  So that should dispose of that objection.  The question of notability is already shown by the size of the news group and, as Smita below has shown and I repeat the quote that he supplied


 * "The common theme in the notability guidelines is that there must be verifiable, objective evidence that the subject has received significant attention from independent sources to support a claim of notability."


 * The only question remaining is whether the material in the entry is accurate and substantiated. If you think that is the case, then you need to withdraw your bid for deletion.  If not, you need to indicate what parts of the entry are not substantiated and the Shen group will either withdraw them or find the necessary citations - Willi.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Williriha (talk • contribs) 16:20, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, you're wrong. We do not decide whether to keep an article based on whether it's accurate and substantiated.  We decide based on whether there are independent secondary sources in reliable publications that discuss the topic.  It appears no such sources exist.  You can fix this.  Go get something published in ANY reliable publication -- it could be TV Guide for all anyone cares -- and you can have your article.  But we do not keep articles where the only sources are primary or self-published.  Msnicki (talk) 16:30, 13 March 2015 (UTC)


 * keep In the Lisp family of languages, Shen stands out in at least two respects: (1) Its type system, which is closer to a general theorem prover than to a traditional type system, and (2) its implementation by compilation to a minimalist subset of itself. Shen is actively developed, well documented in The Book of Shen, and it has a small but active user base organized in a mailing list. Not being a Wikipedia expert, I cannot say if this suffices for notability, but as a Wikipedia user I would definitely expect Wikipedia to have an entry on Shen. — 82.66.102.10 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. — Note: An editor has expressed a concern that 82.66.102.10 (talk • contribs) has been canvassed to this discussion.   The preceding unsigned comment was added at 08:43, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Again, the book is a WP:PRIMARY source, written by the author of this language and does not contribute to notability. If you would like to see an article about Shen here in WP, it's really, really simple:  Go publish something somewhere else in a reliable source first, then come back and you'll get your article in a jiffy.  Why is this so hard?  Msnicki (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the important sense of notability re Wikipedia is - 'of interest to a significant number of people'. This is contained in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
 * Comment.

"The common theme in the notability guidelines is that there must be verifiable, objective evidence that the subject has received significant attention from independent sources to support a claim of notability."

Shen easily passes this test by virtue of the size of the news group and the number of threads in the group.


 * There are no grounds for deletion by non-notability even by your own standards**. You're out of order according to your own rules.

Also this ridiculous 'canvassing' nonsense needs to stop. The topic is all over the Shen news group. That's the only reason I'm here. Strong keep. — Smita59 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 14:25, 10 March 2015 (UTC).


 * Comment.

Hi Msnicki

Here are some articles about Shen from 3rd parties:


 * Alien algebra http://www.klltkr.com/2
 * At the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers http://www.klltkr.com/3
 * Typed Lazy Lists http://www.klltkr.com/4
 * Shen infix notation http://www.klltkr.com/7
 * Purely Functional Data Structures & Algorithms : Union-Find http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2012-08-19-201539_purely-functional-data-structures-algorithms-union-find.html
 * Purely Functional Data Structures & Algorithms : Selection Sort http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2012-08-30-223843_purely-functional-data-structures-algorithms-selection-sort.html
 * Quick Sort in Shen http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2012-04-02-142839_quick_sort_in_shen.html
 * Happy Pi Day in Shen http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2012-03-14-222623_happy_pi_day_shen.html

More here: http://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/category/functional-programming/shen-qi

Do these count

Tiodante (talk) 21:43, 11 March 2015 (UTC) — Tiodante (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.


 * No, sorry, they do not. Those all appear to be WP:Self-published sources.  Anybody can claim to be an expert and publish anything on his own.  This is why we ask for WP:Reliable sources, defined as those with reputations for fact-checking and editorial control, and do not accept blogs, YouTube videos and so on.  But any reliable source will do.  It could be a hobbyist magazine as long it's reliable and you can somehow get your material published there.  It doesn't have to be Communications of the ACM.  Msnicki (talk) 22:02, 11 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Understood, thanks. Tiodante (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.