[MTarver]

I'll let others judge the originality of Shen.

I would say that the performance of Shen is very much a function of the platform and the person who did the port. The Merlin compiler in Qi II would, as doall points out, outpace the output of a Lisp programmer. I've yet to put all that technology into Shen.

Also, credit to the 2011 Shen committee members who ported Shen to so many platforms, the versatility of being being able to traffic Shen code across languages is what made Aditya's work and talk possible.