Chris vanBuskirk wrote:
I would personally like to thank Russ for the amazing stamina he has
shown during the past few weeks in fighting this battle of trying to
figure out how to make Oz more available to the masses. In my opinion
[watching this list for several years], there has always been a
not-so-subtle, condescending attitude towards newcomers that ask newbie
questions (granted, there have been phases where some of those question
seemed to be related to "homework" problems during semester deadlines).
Personally, I don't feel that "buy and read the ~1000 page CTM document"
suffices as a catch-all answer.
I started writing the long-term future of Oz's success off a couple of
years ago. Progress/maintenance seems to be inadequate, if not
non-existent. But ... maybe ... is there still possibly hope? Can we
manage to bring new converts into the coven? Should I *not* be awaiting
desperately the maturation of Alice [or some other technology]?
(snicker, snicker)
Dear Chris,
Thanks for bringing your thoughts into the open! We would like people
to pitch in and
help with Oz development. I don't think we ever meant to be
condescending, sorry if
that comes across wrong. Maybe it's because of the academic attitude to
always try to be
as precise as possible.
BTW, we have never stopped doing maintenance of Oz/Mozart. For example,
the uniform
state syntax, fixing leaks in the garbage collector, and fixing the lazy
evaluation (adding
WaitNeeded) are some of the developments that happened during
2003-2004. The 1.3.0
release was done in sync with the publication of CTM. At UCL we are
working on
distributed programming: we are completing and porting Erik Klintskog's
DSS to Mozart
for the next release. We are hopelessly understaffed though. We would
*really* appreciate
help from the user community (which I hope has been growing because of
CTM). That's
why we reorganized the Mozart work with the Mozart Board and are asking
people to send
in MEPs. But we really need help from the community. By ourselves we
can just keep
Mozart maintained and useful for our own research. Mozart development
doesn't happen
by magic, it's a lot of hard work :-).
I'd like to thank Russ too, his questions have been very constructive.
Peter
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