[Oz] Oz vs. Squeak

[Per Badlund]

Hello!
I just wanted to present my humble point of view in this discussion.
I'm using Oz as a student in a course at school, but I also work as a
programmer
(but not with Oz) in the industry.

I think that Oz could be a great language in the industry too, not only in
the 
academic world. But to make it a success in the industry, I think the
programming environment
must be a bit more user friendly. I don't say that Emacs is a bad
environment, but unfortunately,
in my opinion I think that it is the "front-end" of the language that
convinces a user that a language is
a "professional" language that can be used in the industry and not only an
"experimental" language.
The Emacs environment might scare away some people.

So, to summarize: i think that if it is a goal to make Oz more wide-spread,
then it is necessary that
there are good tools available to help the programmer, like a good debugger,
a good development environment,
a good help functionality.

Best regards,
Per Badlund


-----Original Message-----
From: Alvaro A.A. Fernandes [mailto:alvaro at cs.man.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 3:58 PM
To: users at mozart-oz.org
Subject: Re: [Oz] Oz vs. Squeak


I'm thrilled that so many people are interested in Oz. A few people have
expressed a desire for Oz to have (or be seen through) an IDE (as
understood in industrial circles) other than an emacs-based interface as
is currently the case.

I think it would be all to the good for Oz to have such an IDE. But, I
note, this is very much a developer's view of Oz as an application
development platform. My own view is a researcher's view, and is, I
believe, somewhat different. For me at least, an IDE runs the risk of,
by design, trying to protect me from seeing/touching things that, as a
researcher, I do exactly want to see and touch. 

While I don't recall anyone suggesting that Oz should have only one
IDE-like interface, the purpose of my message is simply to say that, for
some of us, Oz without emacs would be not so good a prospect.

Alvaro
-- 
Information Management Group        URL  http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~alvaro
Department of Computer Science      email       a.fernandes at cs.man.ac.uk
University of Manchester            phone            +44 (0)161 275 6199
Oxford Road, Manchester M3 9PL, UK  fax              +44 (0)161 275 6236
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