The Development of Oz and Mozart

In this talk I will review the development of the programming language Oz and the programming system Mozart. I will discuss where in hindsight I see the strong and the weak points of the language. Moreover, I will compare Oz with Alice, a typed functional language we developed after Oz. The development of Oz started in 1991 at DFKI under my lead. The initial goal was to advance ideas from constraint and concurrent logic programming and also from knowledge representation and to develop a practically useful programming system. After a number of radical and unforeseen redesigns we arrived in 1995 at the final base language and a stable implementation (DFKI Oz). In 1996 we founded the Mozart Consortium with SICS and Louvain-la-Neuve. Oz was extended with support for persistence, distribution and modules and Mozart 1.0 was released in January 1999.