[Oz] Oz vs. Squeak

[Denys Duchier]

mikki at ida.liu.se (Mikael Kindborg) writes:

> To begin with, Squeak appears to have a massive user community, and
> the creators of the language are very active on the mailing list which
> has up to something like 25 messages per day. At this mailing list
> there are only a few mesages every month. I am certain that a lot of
> activity is going on with Oz at SICS and other places, but as an outsider
> it is difficult to take part in these activities.

I completely agree and this is a matter that I wished to bring up
after the impending release of Mozart 1.1.1.  I want the project to
actively encourage community participation, in particular for the
development of tools and libraries.  While MOGUL made it possible to
offer your own creations to the rest of the community, it did nothing
to encourage and foster the sense of a communal effort.

I would like to ask Oz users for feedback on this idea:  how can we
work together to improve Mozart/Oz, develop a rich standard library,
discuss new design ideas, and collaborate on community projects?  This
is your mailing list: let your voice be heard!

> A related issue is the update frequency of the websites. The Squeak
> site uses a wiki and is updated frequently by many people. The most
> recent entry of the Oz site news page is dated Feb 29, 2000. I visit
> the Oz site quite often, and I have a hard time to detect any
> updates.

Yes, this is also a sore point.  I wish there were a better
infrastructure for keeping our site updated, but that requires time
consuming effort for which we don't have the manpower.  If there are
better suggestions (and possibly volunteers) we'd be glad to entertain
them (the suggestions, I mean - volunteers will need to provide for
their own entertainment :-).  Keep in mind that many of us are
academics - while I spend a great deal of time and effort on Mozart
development, most of my research is actually in computational
linguistics; similar considerations apply to others as well.  That's
also why a community effort is so desirable.

> What I am asking is if there is any interest in the Oz-community for
> pursuing programming environment and user-interface issues?

Yes, there certainly is, at least for UI issues.  Here in Saarbrücken,
there is an on-going effort to create a GTK+ interface, and at the
Belgian site of Louvain, Donatien Grolaux and Peter Vanroy have
developed QTk which allows the creation of GUI's from descriptions: I
love their approach and would like the user community to provide
constructive critical feedback (of course, this goes for other
libraries as well).

As far as programming environment is concerned, I am interested in
tools that facilitate the development, packaging, and installation of
Mozart packages.  I have currently an alpha version of a new tool,
called `ozmake' which is fairly intuitive and works the same on all
platforms (by which I mean also Windows :-).

I don't know if there is interest in developing an IDE for Mozart.
Personally, I am an old hand with Emacs and very comfortable and
productive in that environment; but others might feel differently.

In conclusion, please use this mailing list to discuss ideas and/or
inform the community about on-going mozart related efforts.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615
-
Please send submissions to users at mozart-oz.org
and administriva mail to users-request at mozart-oz.org.
The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.