
Oberon - The Oberlooked Jewel - pmarin
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf
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aw3c2
Warning, direct link to PDF. And for some reason it is linked through Google.
Direct link is <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf>

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pmarin
Thanks. It is strange, the only think I did was to use "Copy link as..." in
the contextual menu.

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_delirium
Yeah, Google has started adding redirect cruft to search results in the past
year or so, which is pretty annoying when trying to share links.

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hollerith
Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, Google search results have been that
way a lot longer than a year.

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_delirium
You're right, looks like it's been at least since 2009. I recall they used to
not have any redirects, and then they started inserting them randomly, for
only maybe 5% of search results. Then at some point they got phased in for all
results. Thought that phase-in was more recent, but seems not.

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zvrba
Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its
derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal
derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about
Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.)

But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object
Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07,
Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those
languages _taken together_ have probaby about user base as "large" as that of
common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.

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sehugg
Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S:
<http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp>

(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper
search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend
not to Google their own language much :) )

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stcredzero
In two decades as a professional programmer, I have only ever heard glowing
remarks from Delphi developers about their environment. Certainly Eclipse and
even Smalltalk can't match that.

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poloniculmov
Delphi 6 and 7 were the best IDE's of their time, way better than Visual
Studio 6. The language was great for the time, there was a vibrant community
around it, you could find a component for everything. Borland also shipped the
sources for their main library, VCL, which helped a lot when debugging. It was
the best way to do Rapid Application Development.

Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and
the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged
behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.

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Joeri
They're no longer lagging. The most recent version has a new ui framework that
is hardware accelerated and cross-platform (a pretty unique combination). You
can even make iOS apps with it.

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MaysonL
I wonder how good their cross-platform fu is if they don't have a mac version
of the IDE.

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pjmlp
As far as I know they are using FreePascal as well.

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pjmlp
Quite a nice system. I even wrote a lexer/parser for it back on my university
days.

It is the living proof that it is possible to use a safe systems programming
language for operating system development.

The Native Oberon system was quite nice to use in how the UI concepts would
map to Oberon modules, as such it was quite extensible.

Sadly, it never got picked up by the industry.

The way methods are associated with types in Go has been influenced by Oberon
language family (see Component Pascal).

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_delirium
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875>

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Tloewald
I remember playing around with Several different versions of Oberon on my Mac
back in the day. It was intriguing but not really useful except for working on
Oberon (fine for a comp sci course). The one lasting impact it had on me was
that its system font was a really nice sans serif face called Syntax, which I
continue to use for many purposes today.

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X4
For those who waited for "the language" by Nikolaus Wirth those may have a
look into Zonnon
[http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y...](http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y041123.pdf)
[<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075>]

I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system
was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery
can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms),
instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.

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pmr_
Oberon was the language used in my high-school courses (This was only 7 years
ago). I had a hard time understanding the choice at the time and no one was
able to explain it to me, but now it seems it was the logical decision when
you try to move away from Pascal as a learning language.

The resources at the time available on the web certainly didn't reinforce my
confidence in the choice and so I went to the C derivatives and never looked
back. If there would have been better resources and better 'publicity' my
choice might have been different.

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colomon
Did anyone else find the story about switching from a tree structure to a list
kind of weird? On the one hand, that's a pretty trivial sort of optimization,
and hardly seems worth making a fuss about.

But on the other hand, isn't he assuming that any future users of his compiler
will have source code that looks like his? Sounds like all it would take is
one person using an automatic code generator to generate Oberon code that's
not smart about reusing variable names to bring the compiler to its knees...

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alexeiz
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/> \- "Franz received a Dr. sc. techn. degree in
Computer Science (advisor: Niklaus Wirth) and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
degree, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich."

So Michael Franz can hardly be considered impartial to this matter.

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rbanffy
I'd love to have an FPGA-based Lilith to go along my also wanted Alto and
Symbolics machines.

