Classification of the principal programming paradigms

People "get" Lisp and Smalltalk in the appreciative sense; you see how cleanly they allow you to engineer software and you have a smile on your face. Forth is cute, specially as soon as you peer inside and see how little implementation there is to it. Prolog is the one that will make you sit up and take notice. Prolog is interesting .. until you need to get work done ;-)

Oz makes Prolog look boring. It has no syntactic gymnastics fun like Perl and C; the text of the language is clear as day. It's when you start to evaluate the code in your head, scrolling down slowly and sliding each line of code off the visible screen and into your mind, that your eye brows begin to rise .. slowly at first, then soon your face is stretched long, like Edvard Munch's The Scream.

A highly recommended beautiful thing, best taken slowly with the company of van Roy and Haridi.