Mozart/Alice future and GUI building.

[Peter Van Roy]

israel r thomas wrote:
> 
> > 1. IDE with (at least) good...
> >    -GUI design support
> >    -version control support
> >    -web integration
> 
> The emacs based ide works fairly well.
> However, interactive GUI design facilities are essential if Mozart is to be 
> taken seriously.
> Otherwise, it will always just be a fringe player, confined to the constraint
> logic niche.

I think Mozart's niche is larger than constraint logic.  It has at least
three other niches.  It has a niche in distributed programming; it is state
of the art in open transparent distribution.  We are working on significant
improvements, e.g., in peer-to-peer computing.  It has a niche in user
interface design.  We want to start a project at UCL in adaptive and 
context-sensitive dynamic user interfaces.  In that area, Mozart is state
of the art.  Finally, Mozart is state of the art as a basis for teaching
programming, as witness our textbook.

Mozart was never intended to compete head-on with so-called "mainstream" 
languages and environments (Java, C#, etc.).  It does have many technical
advantages over these environments, for people who care to look.

> Even in that field, Mercury has advantages.

What advantages does Mercury have in constraint programming, beyond the
continued use of Horn clause syntax?  In my view, that is not a technical
advantage, but a sociological one (many old logic programmers are in love
with Horn clause syntax).  Technically speaking, there is no reason
whatsoever that logic programming should be based on resolution, which
was originally designed as an inference rule for automatic theorem
provers!  It was the basis of Prolog, but its day is over.  It should now
be abandoned as quickly as possible.

> >I hope Mozart together with Alice :-) could change something here.
> 
> Is Mozart being abandoned ?
> 
> The emphasis on Alice is worrying.
> After all, there are plenty of ML variants out there already.

Mozart is not being abandoned.  In my view, static typing is interesting,
but to explore the limits of language expressiveness, dynamic typing is
*essential*.  Therefore, the research and continuing development of Mozart
is important, for fundamental scientific reasons.

-- 
Peter Van Roy
Département d'Ingénierie Informatique
(Department of Computing Science and Engineering)
Université catholique de Louvain
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Email: pvr at info.ucl.ac.be
Tel: (+32) (10) 47.83.74
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