Scala + Mozart/Oz

Oz is a pretty damn cool language. But I think another thing that's hampering its adoption, apart from syntax, is the lack of available libraries.

I also have to add to the praise of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. I remember in particular an exercise from that book where you were asked to write a simple parser in a particular paradigm. It basically asked you to write the procedure parse(code, syntax_tree), where you'd give the code as the first parameter, and where syntax_tree was the output parameter. Once you had made that, the last sub-exercise said "Oh BTW, try calling your function with an empty code parameter, and an existing syntax tree." Lo and behold, it worked! My parser could run in reverse, and it spat out all strings that would produce the given syntax tree. This was a mind blowing experience at the time.

I wonder why they're pursuing a proper extension of Scala. Odersky is working with a group in Stanford to make the language even more extensible, in order to enable parallel 'languages' to be implemented as domain specific languages (i.e. as libraries). This seems like a much easier and more fruitful way to popularize Oz (or something Oz-like).

Reference: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/150346/files/onl0000031-ch...

For more on the "Functional Patters are Concurrency Patterns" idea, see Bob Harper's recent post on the subject:

https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/parallelism...

(The whole blog is worth reading; Harper is basically giving a blow-by-blow as CMU rolls out it's new functional-programming-first CS curriculum.)

Wasn't functional programming with a Mozart/OZ Engine basically tried with AliceML:

http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/

I'm not sure syntax is the main reason for slow uptake of Mozart. In fact the syntax can offer some advantages. See this post by pvr about a tail recursive append without helper functions:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/755#comment-7056

Chris Rathman followed up with an AliceML version and compares the syntax:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/755#comment-7057

I like Mozart/Oz but the two main things missing for me are unicode support and 64 bit support.

For reference: http://www.mozart-oz.org/

My favorite features of M/Oz:

* logic programming:

http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node8.html#c...

* concurency:

http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node8.html#c...

Jonas Bonér has been a big fan of Mozart/Oz for a long time, so naturally he rolled some dataflow concurrency support into Akka: http://doc.akka.io/dataflow-scala

pvr doesn't give up, does he? :o) i hope this one finally hits the big-time (but i worry he's underestimating the complexity of scala and over-estimating its popularity).