[Oz] Oz vs. Squeak

[Bob Calco]

Please see my embedded comments...

>
> 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.

As a corporate prisoner to the Windows operating system, I do find Emacs
conceptually interesting but not very productive as a development
environment. When you're used to Windows apps, Emacs' paradigm is a bit
disorienting. Plus, its windows implementation is pretty clunky. You can
always tell when Unix folks port programs to Windows that they have a
certain disdain for it, and that shows in the end product. For Windows at
all events, I'm willing to build an IDE with all the bells and whistles that
developers on Windows are used to. While it wouldn't be cross platform as an
IDE, it would certainly highlight the strengths of Oz and minimize the
Unix-y aspects of Emacs that would turn a lot of Windows developers off. I
can also work on integrating Oz with COM and COM+, and eventually maybe even
.NET. I'd probably build the IDE in Delphi or C++ Builder, both of which are
being ported by Borland to Linux. They'll include a cross platform GUI
library, CLX, which means the code would compile as written on both
platforms, but for the time being the first Windows version of the IDE can
be a straight Windows implementation. I of course would provide the IDE free
with source for those who want it, and I can maintain a little "Windows"
corner of the website.

BUT I need to get more familiar with Oz first (something I am determined to
do because I think it is a VERY promising language for longer term projects
I'm involved in)... and I'm in the middle of a development effort now that's
very intense, AND I'm (supposed to be) writing a book for Macmillan
Technical Publishing on Automated Software Testing... so give me some time
to get started.... any encouragement would be helpful in getting started
"sooner rather than later" though I get the feeling that I'm addressing a
crowd that's not exactly Windows-friendly... ;)

Someday, I'd like to be the "Wizard of Oz" on Windows... for what it's
worth. For an analogy, consider the work of Mark Hammond in the Python
(www.python.org) community. He works for ActiveState (www.activestate.com)
and is primarily responsible for extending Python on Windows to do things
like COM, ISAPI integration, and so on.

Sincerely,

Bob Calco
Centreville, Virginia, USA
rcalco at cortechs.com

>
> 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/.
>

-
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/.