
Oberon – The Overlooked Jewel (2000) [pdf] - marsmxm
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90.7173&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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pjmlp
It was a great OS and language.

For me it opened my mind to what is possible with a GC enabled systems
programming language and made me delve into Modula-3, Oberon derivatives and
its precursor Mesa/Cedar at Xerox PARC.

Unfortunately all of those not touched by it, still don't believe in GC
enabled systems programming languages.

At least a little bit of its soul now lives on as Go.

Even if I dislike some of its design decisions, it would be nice to see
someone redo Oberon in Go (it just needs a bare metal runtime like Oberon's
KERNEL).

~~~
amyjess
> For me it opened my mind to what is possible with a GC enabled systems
> programming language and made me delve into Modula-3

Also, if you like Modula-3, you'll probably love Nim.

It's also a GC-enabled systems programming language (someone even redid the
OSdev minimal kernel in Nim), and the official FAQ lists Modula-3 as its top
influence (in practice, it feels like Modula-3 semantics mapped to Python
syntax).

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks for the hint, I know Nim.

However I have came lately to the realisation that .NET and the JVM worlds
already take too much of my time to look elsewhere.

Due to my interest in programming languages I still keep on reading about new
developments, but at the end of the day what matters is what my employer cares
about.

------
Hermel
Oberon was my first programming language, taught by Jürg Gutknecht himself.
One week, our home assignmend was "write your own file system". At first, I
thought that would be impossible to do in such a short time. However, it
turned out to be not that hard thanks to the clean and simple design of the
Oberon operating system.

~~~
k__
I only heard from fellow students about it.

Some of them changed universities explicitly because programming was taught
with Oberon. They don't wanted to waste time with a language that wouldn't
give them a good job after university.

At the university where I did my first degree, we learned Java, C/C++ and PHP.
Back in the days I thought this was a good thing, because I could use this
knowledge directly at work.

But at the second university I got an introduction to SmallTalk, which blew my
mind. Now I know the value of looking into alternative programming languages
once in a while.

~~~
pjmlp
I got to learn it while at university in Lisbon, when looking into stuff for
compiler design.

As I refer on a sibling post, it opened my mind to systems programming with GC
enabled languages, specially interesting when one thinks how the desktop
computers looked in the mid-90's.

A decade later I got to enjoy a talk from Niklaus and Jürg at CERN, but Oberon
was already on the way out.

------
pedrow
For the curious, it's possible to download a 'Native Oberon' image from the
website[1] and run it under VirtualBox. It's interesting to see how things
might have turned out and also it's astonishing how quickly it boots up. The
influence on Plan9's acme (I think it's that way around) is clear.

[1]:[http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/](http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/)

~~~
fit2rule
Looks like the archive is offline .. haven't been able to find another source,
alas. :(

~~~
pedrow
Sorry a bit late replying (been on vacation!) Try:
ftp://ftp.ethoberon.ethz.ch/ETHOberon/

------
soapdog
Does anyone know of an image of the oberon system that one could run on qemu,
virtualbox or something similar?

I understand it was a complete system from scratch including the hardware but
I think I saw somewhere that the OS/Compiler/Tools were ported to other
architectures.

~~~
pjmlp
You can learn a bit more about it here,

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9847955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9847955)

I don't know if any of the available images still work properly.

Or if you like screenshots:

[http://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=com...](http://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compilers&type=tutorial)

~~~
soapdog
thanks a lot!

------
mhd
One thing that really says a lot about Wirth's philosophy is that in the most
recent revision (2007?) he actually _removed_ a rather common feature from the
language (multiple returns!).

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
> He used the compiler’s self-compilation speed as a measure of the compiler’s
> quality.

Heh that's an interesting idea. Go could do that now that it is written in go.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's a measure of the compiler's quality, and also of the language
specification complexity.

------
random778
Could anyone give a base/guidance on how one would start comparing/explaining
the similarities/differences between Oberon and Smalltalk?

------
treerex
Can someone compare Oberon against Genera, beyond the obvious implementation
language and hardware?

