Impressions of Mozart-Oz

[Peter-Henry Mander]

Hi Bijan,

Agreed, Prolog is an industrial language, but I faced a steep learning 
curve when I first encountered it. Not until I conceived the algorithms 
as diagrams of logic gates, as in electronic schematics, that I 
understood the implicit concurrency of Prolog. Powerful? Certainly. Easy 
to use/debug? I'm not so sure, but I didn't use it that much to fully 
understand how it works. And add to the picture green/red cuts that seem 
to break the "logic" of Prolog.

Your point about the widespread use of XSLT is true, but it doesn't 
extend its reach into general purpose programming (yet). And Lord is it 
ugly! That may seem trivial, but I go cross-eyed reading xslt, which 
kills my productivity, needless to say!

As far as practical and accessible languages go, Erlang scores high, 
better than most.

Pete.

Bijan Parsia wrote:

>On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Peter-Henry Mander wrote:
>
>[snip]
>  
>
>>It would seem to me that Mozart suffers the same problem as almost all
>>Functional/Logic programming languages, in that it originates and will
>>probably remain in academic circles.
>>    
>>
>
>Just like to note that Prolog long ago moved into industry, has several
>commerical vendors whose sole business is selling their implementation
>(well, and consulting, training, etc.). OTOH, XSLT is a fairly pure
>functional programming language. There are probably more XSLT programmers
>than all the rest of the functional programming language programmers,
>including Erlang.
>[snip]
>
>This isn't to say that Erlang doesn't rule. It does. :)
>
>I do agree with the overall points that Erlang has a very good balance of
>very useful simplicity and functionality (in the language itself) and a
>great set of applications. To these I add that it has enough real
>experience out there to have developed a useful set of "design patterns"
>and methodologies that fit in well with the language/library features (all
>this is clearly the result of iterative design with a fine feedback loop).
>The applications generally exhibit the design patterns in a lucid way,
>which makes it easy to get into the swing of things.
>
>Cheers,
>Bijan Parsia.
>
>
>
>  
>