
Classification of the principal programming paradigms - nreece
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html
======
mahmud
If you visualize the graphic as five columns, you can see Oz appears in every
column. I have been playing with Mozart/Oz for a while, it's a very small
kernel language that you can learn the syntax of in a weekend, just like Lisp,
Forth, Smalltalk and Prolog. But Mozart/Oz is a complete mindfuck.

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.

~~~
silentbicycle
Yes, and the associated book (CTM, <http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html>)
is _excellent_ , in much the same way as SICP. It's an in-depth tour of
several major programming paradigms. They show relevant parts of Oz used for,
say, lazy evaluation or OO, and then talk about the paradigm's strengths, how
it affects reasoning about programs using it, etc. The writing is very clear,
without shying away from being challenging.

There's a PDF draft version online (<http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/3108#comment-45392>), but after a chapter or so I decided to
just get the hardcover.

------
vorador
And where is FORTH ?

~~~
mgreenbe
Stack-orientation isn't a axis on this chart, nor is macro support. So: next
to Pascal and C.

