I also find this surprising. I've been programming for almost three decades in many languages, and I find several elements of Oz syntax very empowering. I've done some work in Scala as well and like the language very much, in particular its ability to create DSLs in such a straightforward. It would be interesting to see how examples from CTM translate to Ozma, as that would really give us an appreciation of how much expressiveness is lost in translation. Maybe we could also think about the elements of Oz syntax that we find particularly expressive and empowering when working with Oz to at least try to make sure those don't get lost.
Marko On 14/04/2011 17:25, [email protected] wrote: > For two years now I have taught Oz to a few (6 in all) advanced high school > students. All had at least a year's experience with Java programming. > > I myself had decades of experience with I've forgotten how many languages. > > So this is a sample of seven people who either are not very experienced or > have experience beyond the C/Java syntactic family that is so popular now. I > believe > most, if not all, of us would agree that a fair bit of the power of Oz lies > in > its syntax. > > As for people finding it more difficult to change syntax than to add > concepts, look > at the mathematics education they have gone through: very little syntactic > change > compared to conceptual change. I'm thinking syntax is akin to language and > language is what we use to understand concepts. > > J Adrian Zimmer > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Lyle Kopnicky" <[email protected]> > Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2011 11:41am > To: "Mozart users" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Ozma > > _________________________________________________________________________________ > mozart-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-usersOn Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at > 7:29 AM, Torsten Anders < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> On 14 Apr 2011, at 14:16, Peter Van Roy wrote: >>> we now have a master's student working on a new front-end for >>> Mozart. It will implement a new language called Ozma that is a >>> conservative extension of Scala implemented on top of the Mozart >>> emulator. You should know that Scala is making a lot of waves in the >>> Java community since it's easy to learn for Java programmers and more >>> powerful. Ozma will add all the expressiveness of Oz to Scala, like >>> declarative dataflow concurrency, lazy dataflow concurrency, and >>> multiagent dataflow programming. Ozma will bring the slogan "functional >>> patterns are concurrency patterns" to Scala programmers. >> >> Is Ozma statically typed, as Scala? >> >> Interesting that syntax has such an impact. Is there some research that >> confirms that the issue is really the syntax and not the programming >> concepts? >> > Hmm, I have mixed feelings about this. Kudos to those who want to spread > the wonderful concepts of Oz. But I also feel that a lot of the power of the > language comes from its syntax. I am amazed that people are more allergic to > a foreign syntax than to foreign computational paradigms. > > - Lyle > > > _________________________________________________________________________________ > mozart-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users > _________________________________________________________________________________ mozart-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users
