The End of Oz | Hacker News Reader

The End of Oz

lareviewofbooks.org

45 pointsobjections13 comments

In case anybody is interested, but isn't aware. The Oz "universe" is quite expansive and extends far beyond the 1939 film.

There's over a dozen books in the series by the original author and they're all in the public domain, free for anybody, and they hold up amazingly well as children's fantasy novels with memorable characters and an impressive amount of creativity. You can find them here (as well as dozens of other creative works by the same author): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42

There's also a couple dozen later works set in the same universe by other authors, notably 19 by Ruth Plumly Thomson. Most of these, I believe, are also in the public domain. You can find most of Thomson's works here https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompso...

A complete list of Oz books is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books Notable authors who've written in Oz include Soviet author Alexander Volkov, Philip Jose Farmer, Joan D. Vinge, and even Stephen King.

In addition to the famous '39 film, there's several other films including a 1910 film, 1925 silent film, a 1933 Canadian animated, a 1975 film, a 1982 anime, an 1986 Japanese anime series, a 1950 half-hour tv adaptation, a 2013 film, various musical adaptations (including a Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow urban retelling in the mid-70s), games, comics and so on. There's also a 1985 Sequel film called "Return to Oz".

For anyone else who wondered, Mozart/Oz 2 has seen few commits this last year. And no new releases. It's still missing constraints and distributed objects. There was some work[1] porting 1.3 to 64-bit a year ago, but it's not quickly clear to me that it was ever merged. And I still don't know of a page to point people at, which conveys the wonderfulness that was Oz. Call it an extensible language, distributed, merged with a constraint system.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozart-users/jwk6D9e...

Ha, I don't think you realized what the article was about.

I haven't read the article, so I choose to believe that the Los Angeles Review of Books has published an essay about an obscure hobbyist operating system project. That really would be edgy.

I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the domain.

Still, it's very sad that Mozart/Oz gets no attention. IMHO, the associated book CTM is on par with SICP.

I wish someone ported all their ideas to a Lisp, if that made development more lively.

> I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the domain.

And I.

> no attention [...] CTM is on par with SICP.

It looks like CTM is available online at the moment: "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102...

I don't recall what year the SICP pdf became free for download from MIT Press. But while CTM drafts were available during writing, they vanished upon publication. Which given the poor state of other Mozart/Oz documentation, was an adoption barrier.

Scheme also seemed to have a broader base of support, with ties into the broader lisp and programming communities. M/Oz seemed more a European academic instructional-and-a-bit-of-research VM/language. A very different cultural context. And broader societal open-source culture and infrastructure was less developed back then, so there was less to fall back on.

I'm reminded of Poplog, a polylingual system of Common Lisp, Prolog, ML, and a C-like language, out of Sussex. But the culture from which the authors came, and the economic choices they made, took something with seemingly great potential, and reduced it to near-zero impact. EDIT: Looks like it's again ported to 64-bit as of this summer, FWIW: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog...

Also perhaps, while Scheme was a lisp, Oz was weird in its own unique way, so it hit "eww, parentheses"-like resistance without sanctuary. Which I fuzzily recall motivating a second language for the Mozart VM, dividing attention.

> ported all their ideas to a Lisp

Some ideas from the Oz language might be ported perhaps. But the underlying Mozart VM, which provided the unification, constraints, and distributed programming... hmm. Are any of the lisp implementations of prolog for instance, at all performance competitive?

I think CTM drafts were always available online, even after publication.

At least circa 2004, while working on improving Mozart/Oz online documentation, I did not know of any such. The drafts previously available, had all been taken down. Shrug.

Oops... As the first-ish comment, I should have made clear that I was OT, so as not to mislead anyone about the post's topic. Sorry. :/

Is there a document anywhere that gives a short description of the language and a reason for looking into it?

The official site is most unwelcoming to a casual reader.

> Is there a document anywhere that gives a short description of the language and a reason for looking into it?

Not that I know of. And there now seems little reason for looking into it, except when doing language research.

EDIT: The SICP-like textbook is apparently online. It's not short, but FWIW: "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102...

> The official site is most unwelcoming to a casual reader.

Mozart/Oz documentation... sigh. Think: "bad old days"; "just buy the tome textbook"; that textbook being online (discouraging other docs), and then not (so then there's nothing); academic project; majority of users were students taking mandatory CS courses; in European academia; research papers and talk slides as documentation; and now zombie/death. Years ago I ended up generating my own "virtual manual"[1], but the links have rotted since.

[1] http://www.vendian.org/oz/wiki/index.cgi?VirtualManual But the links are rotted. And it's no longer a wiki, just a snapshot of that page.

There was a MOOC on programming paradignms that used Oz for its material. I was taking and enjoying it but unfortunately it was one of those time-constrained MOOCS where content is only dribbled out on a weekly basis and I got busy with work partway through.

If not for the fact that Coursera and now even edX are gutted[1] for people not paying for their certifications, I'd give it another go.

1) The final straw was disabling automated graders. They basically took away the one really compelling feature MOOCs have for programming topics that YouTube videos don't.

I'm annoyed that I read all the way to the end to find the author's conclusion is that everything in the world today is awful and everyone is pretending it isn't (that we are living a lie and pretending to live in Oz). What tosh. It is doubly annoying because from my perspective the exact opposite is true; that the world has never been better and most people believe things are the worst they've ever been.

I did enjoy reading through and remembering the Oz stories.

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