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Shen is a very unique language, and one of the ways in which it is unique is that so much of its marketing, information, etc is non-obvious, and less accessible than you might want.
I think the main thing that I find compelling about shen is its type system, especially its sequent calculus system (for defining types in a way that would not be possible for most languages).
The other thing about it that is compelling is how portable it is. the main language is implemented in a simple kernel language; someone who wanted to port the language to a new environment would need to implement a small (relatively) set of primitives, and then you can run the entire shen environment on top of it.
Its worth looking into, however I do caution that it has plenty of rough edges etc.
For me personally I think of it as an inspiration for programming languages I wish to develop someday. Additionally, if you ever worked in a certain environment and really dislike that the language is a bit weak, shen might be something you could port to that language and use. For example, I recently updated https://github.com/deech/shen-elisp so that some of its rough edges were a bit smoothed down and should be more usable; I haven't actually written any shen yet that runs in emacs. That's still a ways away.
I've spinning up a new Shen implementation from scratch, in Racket, which integrates directly with my Prolog implementation, Scryer Prolog:
https://github.com/mthom/scryer-shen/
Several innovations are documented in the README.
There are open source ports that have a clear license now: https://github.com/Shen-Language/shen-sources/blob/master/LI...
That said, even if I don't use this a lot, I pay for Shen Professional to support development. Like you, I got and read the book and like the ideas, and I decided to support the project because I rather be sold something explicit (a programming language) than who knows what I get sold through a language that is open source but depends on a few or even one big company to pay the devs.
thank you! the scryer community deserves much of the credit too. everyone is welcome and encouraged to join us at https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog! some exciting plans in the pipe