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Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

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Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#81

Post by EffCompute »

Rochus wrote: post #55
guenthert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, C on LLVM or GCC should probably be considered the “upper bound” when it comes to how well a program can be optimized, and thus the benchmark for any performance measurement. Is it? Isn't it rather the case that C is too low level to express intent and (hence) offer room to optimize? I would expect that a language in which, e.g. matrix multiplication can be natively expressed, could be compiled to more eff…

> I would expect that a language in which, e.g. matrix multiplication can be natively expressed, could be compiled to more efficient code for such. That's exactly the question we would hope to answer with such an experiment. Given that your language received sufficient investments to implement an optimal LLVM adaptation (as C did), we would then expect your language to be significantly faster on a benchmark heavily d…

Rochus, your point about LLVM and the 'upper bound' of C optimization is a bit of a bitter pill for systems engineers. In my own work, I often hit that wall where I'm trying to express high-level data intent (like vector similarity semantics) but end up fighting the optimizer because it can't prove enough about memory aliasing or data alignment to stay efficient.

I agree with guenthert that higher-level intent should theoretically allow for better optimization, but as you said, without the decades of investment that went into the C backends, it's a David vs. Goliath situation.

The 'spiraling complexity' of LLVM you mentioned is exactly why some of us are looking back at leaner designs. For high-density data tasks (like the 5.2M documents in 240MB I'm handling), I'd almost prefer a language that gives me more predictable, transparent control over the machine than one that relies on a million-line optimizer to 'guess' what I'm trying to do. It feels like we are at a crossroads between 'massive compilers' and 'predictable languages' again.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#82

Post by homarp »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #80
wk_end wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need furth…

Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.

it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise

see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#83

Post by wk_end »

luismedel wrote: post #77
wk_end wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need furth…

Exactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever. What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "yo…

> I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth.

Yes, I think that's a mistake. Lisp and Forth saw widespread commercial use, were hugely influential, and directly begat many other languages. While I'd expect most folks on here to be familiar with Pascal - you could say those same things about it - and maybe even know who Wirth is, Oberon basically saw no commercial use whatsoever and even in academia was basically only used at the school it came from. There's no real comparison.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#84

Post by Rochus »

loneboat wrote: post #64
Rochus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good opportunity to consult wikipedia once again ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) ), or to ask your trusted LLM.

Pasting a Wikipedia link or saying "just ask an LLM" only helps out the one instance of someone not knowing. I did the same thing as the OP you're replying to. They're right - a brief summary in the readme would be a near zero-effort permanent fix to people who stumble on your project and dont know what Oberon is.

Thinking independently and learning strategies to find their own way are among the most important foundations for anyone interested in technology or who wants to work in the field. If people are curious enough about a keyword or topic, they should also be willing to put in some effort to research it. Or, if that really isn’t possible, they should ask good questions. That’s generally much more promising than confronting the author of a post with accusations right off the bat.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#85

Post by Rochus »

homarp wrote: post #82
nothinkjustai wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.

it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/

It’s also worth noting that Jan (who strictly uses the pronouns var / val) belongs to one of the most historically marginalized groups in modern tech: One-Pass Compiler Enthusiasts. They were repeatedly ostracized by the bloated LLVM cabal for stating that any build process taking longer than 50 milliseconds is a toxic social construct. The ETH fork was actually meant to fund a decentralized safe space where nobody is ever forced to use a borrow checker.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#86

Post by wk_end »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #80
wk_end wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need furth…

Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.

I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW:

ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans.

But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible.

Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#87

Post by fhars »

luismedel wrote: post #77
wk_end wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need furth…

Exactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever. What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "yo…

Yes, you are likely confusing Oberon with Pascal. That is the Wirth language people usually have heard about. They may also have heard about Modula 2, but assuming that is stretching it. I was already interested in computers at the time, but I still only remember Oberon as that even bigger failure than Modula.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#88

Post by cyberax »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
cyberax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still hope to see the world where Oberon is the future (and present) of OS and programming language design I see you're into horror stories. Oberon is absolutely a horrible language. It's an example of how you can screw up a good language by insisting on things that were important in 1960-s. Like not allowing multiple returns (not multiple return _values_ but multiple returns).

Apparently a school of though widely embraced by Go scholars, nowadays resposible for our cloud infrastructure.

Go added multiple returns for error/exception handling. It's a solution, just not a pretty one.

In comparison, Oberon has... nothing. If you check the source code of Oberon OS for something like USB, a lot of code is either YOLO or a mess of nested blocks.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#89

Post by cyberax »

tengwar2 wrote: post #63
cyberax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Traced back" is fine. We can trace back the size of the Shuttle's boosters to the width of the roads in the Roman Empire. Insisting that the problems of 1960 are the only thing that matters, and MUST be solved dogmatically is not.

The story about "the width of the backsides of two Roman horses" is just a myth. Which should be obvious if you look at the many different railway gauges in use. You can trace it back to 19C standardisation, and argue over whether Brunel's 7'¼" was better than standard gauge, or if we should all have converted to 3m Breitspurbahn, but that's a different question.

The thing is, it's not a _total_ myth. All the widespread standard railway gauges are very close to each other, within about 20 cm.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#90

Post by justin66 »

MisterTea wrote: post #70
swiftcoder wrote: post #51

I was about 5 links deep before I figured out what Oberon actually was. A high-level explainer at the top of the readme would be really nice for folks who aren't already familiar with the Oberon ecosystem

I am surprised the top comment on an HN post is someone asking what Oberon is (especially someone who have programmer in their name.) Oberon is not only a programming language, but an entire software and hardware computing system built from the ground up to be as minimal as possible by famed computer scientist Niklaus Wirth. Simple RISC CPU, Oberon compiler, OS And Windowing system. The windowing system was famously…

Remember that people who familiarize themselves with computing history are neither "crushing it" nor doing anything else evocative of advertising for energy drinks. Study of computing history is therefore something to be avoided.
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