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.
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...
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...
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?