It's been an interesting experience for me to learn about Oz. As you may know, I'm a bit more than about a month into it. My approach has been to learn enough to get started and then to attempt to learn what I need as additional questions arose. As some of you have noted, I have been resistant to the idea of reading everything in advance as a way of having at my disposal the particular piece of information I needed at any one time.
For different people, depending on the directions in which they go, their trail of information needs will differ. In my case, I've been focusing on Oz for logic programming--after which I'll be moving to Oz for constraint programming. I haven't needed (nor wanted) to think about Oz's object, stateful, or distributed capabilities at all. It has been a primary uncertainty for me how much I needed to know about Oz's data flow variable model.
I think that most people learn (or would like to learn) things this way: learn what you need to get started (hence the ubiquitous "hello world" examples) and then find out about new stuff as you need it.
Although I know it would be a lot of work, I think it would be a very useful exercise (for Oz as well as for any non-trivial body of information) to see whether Oz documentation could be organized in a way that would facilitate this style of learning/exploration. What do you need to know to get started? What are the directions in which one might go? Along each of those paths, what are the questions that might arise? Can those questions be explained on the basis of the information that has been encountered so far? If not what is the minimal prerequisite knowledge that is need to answer each of those individual questions. Etc.
I'm not prepared to take on such a task. But if someone were able to get support for doing it, not only would the result be valuable for Oz, it would serve as a model for how to organize other non-trivial bodies of information.
-- Russ
_________________________________________________________________________________ mozart-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users
