
The End of Oz - objections
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-end-of-oz-reflections-on-the-centenary-of-l-frank-baums-death/
======
bane
In case anybody is interested, but isn't aware. The Oz "universe" is quite
expansive and extends far beyond the 1939 film.

There's over a dozen books in the series by the original author and they're
all in the public domain, free for anybody, and they hold up amazingly well as
children's fantasy novels with memorable characters and an impressive amount
of creativity. You can find them here (as well as dozens of other creative
works by the same author):
[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42)

There's also a couple dozen later works set in the same universe by other
authors, notably 19 by Ruth Plumly Thomson. Most of these, I believe, are also
in the public domain. You can find most of Thomson's works here
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompso...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompson)

A complete list of Oz books is here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books)
Notable authors who've written in Oz include Soviet author Alexander Volkov,
Philip Jose Farmer, Joan D. Vinge, and even Stephen King.

In addition to the famous '39 film, there's several other films including a
1910 film, 1925 silent film, a 1933 Canadian animated, a 1975 film, a 1982
anime, an 1986 Japanese anime series, a 1950 half-hour tv adaptation, a 2013
film, various musical adaptations (including a Michael Jackson as the
Scarecrow urban retelling in the mid-70s), games, comics and so on. There's
also a 1985 Sequel film called "Return to Oz".

------
mncharity
For anyone else who wondered, Mozart/Oz 2 has seen few commits this last year.
And no new releases. It's still missing constraints and distributed objects.
There was some work[1] porting 1.3 to 64-bit a year ago, but it's not quickly
clear to me that it was ever merged. And I still don't know of a page to point
people at, which conveys the wonderfulness that was Oz. Call it an extensible
language, distributed, merged with a constraint system.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozart-
users/jwk6D9e...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozart-
users/jwk6D9eUh3U)

~~~
pubby
Ha, I don't think you realized what the article was about.

~~~
nextos
I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the
domain.

Still, it's very sad that Mozart/Oz gets no attention. IMHO, the associated
book CTM is on par with SICP.

I wish someone ported all their ideas to a Lisp, if that made development more
lively.

~~~
mncharity
> I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the
> domain.

And I.

> no attention [...] CTM is on par with SICP.

It looks like CTM is available online at the moment: "Concepts, Techniques,
and Models of Computer Programming"
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102.7366&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

I don't recall what year the SICP pdf became free for download from MIT Press.
But while CTM drafts were available during writing, they vanished upon
publication. Which given the poor state of other Mozart/Oz documentation, was
an adoption barrier.

Scheme also seemed to have a broader base of support, with ties into the
broader lisp and programming communities. M/Oz seemed more a European academic
instructional-and-a-bit-of-research VM/language. A very different cultural
context. And broader societal open-source culture and infrastructure was less
developed back then, so there was less to fall back on.

I'm reminded of Poplog, a polylingual system of Common Lisp, Prolog, ML, and a
C-like language, out of Sussex. But the culture from which the authors came,
and the economic choices they made, took something with seemingly great
potential, and reduced it to near-zero impact. EDIT: Looks like it's again
ported to 64-bit as of this summer, FWIW:
[http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog...](http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html)

Also perhaps, while Scheme was a lisp, Oz was weird in its own unique way, so
it hit "eww, parentheses"-like resistance without sanctuary. Which I fuzzily
recall motivating a second language for the Mozart VM, dividing attention.

> ported all their ideas to a Lisp

Some ideas from the Oz language might be ported perhaps. But the underlying
Mozart VM, which provided the unification, constraints, and distributed
programming... hmm. Are any of the lisp implementations of prolog for
instance, at all performance competitive?

~~~
nextos
I think CTM drafts were always available online, even after publication.

~~~
mncharity
At least circa 2004, while working on improving Mozart/Oz online
documentation, I did not know of any such. The drafts previously available,
had all been taken down. Shrug.

------
AlchemistCamp
There was a MOOC on programming paradignms that used Oz for its material. I
was taking and enjoying it but unfortunately it was one of those time-
constrained MOOCS where content is only dribbled out on a weekly basis and I
got busy with work partway through.

If not for the fact that Coursera and now even edX are gutted[1] for people
not paying for their certifications, I'd give it another go.

1) The final straw was disabling automated graders. They basically took away
the one really compelling feature MOOCs have for programming topics that
YouTube videos don't.

------
pastor_williams
I'm annoyed that I read all the way to the end to find the author's conclusion
is that everything in the world today is awful and everyone is pretending it
isn't (that we are living a lie and pretending to live in Oz). What tosh. It
is doubly annoying because from my perspective the exact opposite is true;
that the world has never been better and most people believe things are the
worst they've ever been.

I did enjoy reading through and remembering the Oz stories.

