If your interest in Mozart/Oz is due to it's distributed and parallel computing aspects, you might also find Erlang interesting if you haven't already encountered it.
I find the Erlang cui repl preferable to the Oz emacs-based interface, but if you like emacs that will be less of a consideration.
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
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Tying the language to an editor has almost completely ruled it out for me. What an odd thing to do. It does still sound pretty interesting though. I'm installing erlang presently. I've heard people mention it before.
I feel like I'm taking away a "perl doesn't really have much of this yet" feeling from the two posts above this though. Is that the case?
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Emacs isn't required to use Oz, its just where its "IDE" lives. Most of what I'm doing is using a plain old text editor on my source, then running the compile/run programs in a terminal. Anyway, it appears to be a language worth learning even though I don't think I'll ever really code anything for real in it.
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It's a big file for relatively few slides, but they're certainly tantilising aren't they? I don't suppose that you came across any more details of the talks content did you? I followed all the obvious looking links, but didn't find anything that put any flesh on the bones of the slides. I'd love to hear the talk, but that ain't gonna happen any time soon.
There is an aweful lot to like about Erlang. One thing that I think contributes to it's effectiveness and useability is that it was developed and evolved by non-academics to solve real-world problems with real world, commercial, time and money constraints. As such, it avoids many of the theoretical and 'purity' imperatives that litter academically devloped languages.
This is especially true with the absence of gargon and notation in the documentation. It's very refreshing to see the purpose and feature sets of an FP language described in terms of the real world problems that they evolved to solved; rather than having the real world treated as a dirty black box that the pure world of FP can encapsulate and control.
As an aside. It's nice to see that others think like me about that "Computers are state machines; threads are for people who can't do state machines" quote ;) I've tried before to think of an appropriate analogy for that non sequitur and I finally came up with one:
Cooking is Chemistry; and people without Chemistry degrees shouldn't be allowed to cook.
Anyone who's seen Heston Blumenthal's TV series will understand that whilst the first clause of that statement is very true, if the second were, mass starvation would not be confined to war and drought ridden areas of the Third World.
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
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