[Oz] Oz vs. Squeak

[Seif Haridi]

Micke,
I you are interested in building another development envirnonment for
Oz/Mozart,
you are very welcome in the Mozart team. We will assist you as much as we
can.

--- Seif
Mikael Kindborg wrote:

> At 16:02 2001-01-30 +0100, Denys Duchier wrote:
>
> > > 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).
>
> I have looked at Prototyper and it is very nice. I have not worked
> with it to the extent that I can give any concrete feedback, however,
> the performance on Windows was somewhat slow when using
> several animated objects (sprites). This is an area where I have a
> strong need/interest and thus my questions regarding use of COM
> on Windows, and sockets vs. C++ extensions a while back. Which
> approach is taken by QTk?
>
> >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 read about ozmake in the documentation and it seems very useful.
>
> >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.
>
> The development environment is an area which I personally feel is
> very important for making people starting to use Oz. Let me
> tell you how I got into using Oz. I work with programming tools for
> users that are typically not programmes in a professional sense, for
> instance children. Three years ago I came across ToonTalk, a
> programming tool for children developed by Ken Kahn (see
> http://www.toontalk.com). I learned that the computational model
> of ToonTalk was based on concurrent constraint programming,
> an area which I at that point had little knowledge of. I started to
> learn more, for instance I read the introductory chapters in
> Sverker Jansson's PhD on AKL. I was about to download and try
> AKL when I learned from people at my department (the Computer
> Science Department at Linköping University) that the current research
> at SICS was focused on Oz. So I decided to try Oz. However, I
> must admit that when I got to the download page an learned that
> the programming environment was based on Emacs, I got kind
> of "scared off" (even though I used FINE and Emacs extensively
> 15 years ago). I am just too used to IDE's like JBuilder and
> VisualC++ (and before that Smalltalk and Interlisp-D) to be
> willing to go back using Emacs. And I am not skilful enough that
> I can customise Emacs. This alone was the factor that held me away
> from trying out Oz. I read serveral (very good) papers on the
> implementation of Oz and worked in parallel with an implementation
> on a programming tool for children in Java, but it was not until Seif
> Haridi came to Linköping and gave a demo of Oz that I actually
> downloaded it and tried it out (because it was a really good demo!).
>
> Using a development environment based on Emacs sends out signals
> to people regarding what Oz is and what it is like to develop in Oz,
> and certain people will be attracted by this, while others will shy
> away. As I am an HCI-person, I am very focused on what the
> communication goal is, and if the goal with Oz is to reach out to
> many developers and researchers, my guess is that Emacs will
> not do. Especially in the area of user interfaces. People like myself will
> chose Squeak rather than Oz, even though Squeak is inferior in many
> ways (and happens to have a very ugly default window colour scheme!).
>
> There is something very attractive with the idea of a programming
> environment being open and written in "its own" language (like
> Interlisp and Smalltalk). It would be great to take such an approach
> with Oz, and Prototyper seems as a good step in this direction.
> And it would be great to involve HCI-people in Oz development
> (perhaps this is already done) who could test the language and
> the development tools with various categories of programmers.
> I think that usability is at least as important as "computability"
> to attract people's interest. I personally would love something
> similar to Smalltalk (or even VisualBasic) based on Oz. Even
> more intriguing would be something more radical, like ToonTalk
> for Oz. This is along the lines of what I would like to do with Oz,
> and if such a project would one day became reality, I would
> love to participate if I would be given the opportunity. I have
> also been thinking about starting such a project myself within
> my work on children and programming.
>
> Best, Micke
>
> -
> 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/.