On 15/04/11 03:45, Mathieu Grondin wrote:
I am just starting with Oz... I thought it was not a strongly typed
language [Correct me if I am wrong] in fact I clearly remember from
the book introduction that it was not ?
Oz is strongly typed but not statically typed.
Here are some constructives observations...
I really stumble upon on the oz language by sheer luck because I
digged specifically for something like this for at least a month.
From a SEO stand point, the name OZ was a bad idea... And the Mozart
name also... First of all it is not unique, second it already refers
to quite popular terms... Maybe changing the name would be a great start ?
The name has existed for quite a long time already: the first version of
Oz appeared in the early 1990s ("DFKI Oz"), and the CTM book appeared in
2004! (The language has gone from Oz 1 to Oz 2 to Oz 3, and Oz 3 has
gone through several versions up to version 1.4.0 now.)
I have a business and I have took on programming 10 years ago when I
was fed up with our software problems... I started with C# and .net.
We are based in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). We have a lot of
governement help here for R&D. We did numerous R&D projects and got
almost 90% of salaries back and 40% for consultants work (even
foreigners).
It would be great to create something building on the strenght of the
OZ language and showcase it. Erlang has quite a following now and the
syntax is a bit alien to a java or C programmer... Yet they attracted
a lot of attention.
So the question would be... What could we develop that would really
blow people out of the water and show the true power of the Oz
language and make it shine on the public place ?
Yes, building something on the strengths of Oz is the way to go. Oz is
very good at lightweight concurrency (hundreds of thousands of dataflow
threads can live simultaneously) and distribution (network transparent
distribution that really works). Also, it has good symbolic calculation
abilities, support for constraint programming, and support for adaptive
GUIs: check out the FlexClock and Minesweeper applications (see the
Software section on pldc.info.ucl.ac.be). Beernet
(beernet.info.ucl.ac.be) is a state-of-the-art transactional key/value
store written in Oz. A distributed multi-agent system with hundreds of
thousands of intelligent agents could be written in Oz easily.
Another thing that Oz is very good at is as a language for teaching
programming. We have made a prototype of a first-year course that
teaches concurrency, higher-order, distribution, and fault tolerance:
"Progressive enrichment of multiagent microworlds". The course material
is here (www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/micromondes.html), but it's still rough
and it's in French (for English, just use Google Translate). Somebody
could take this as a start and make a killer programming course for high
school students.
Peter
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