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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)

#91

Post by justin66 »

This is a really cool thing. Thanks Rochus.

The Oberon language and the Oberon System were featured in Byte Magazine several times, most notably in Dick Pountain's articles:

https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199103_Byte_Magazine_Vol_1... https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199305_Byte_Magazine_Vol_1... https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199501_Byte_Magazine_Vol_2...

Spotting similarities betwen the appearance of the Oberon System and Plan 9, or Oberon syntax bits that were used in later languages, is left as an exercise for the reader.

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

#92

Post by cyberax »

rbanffy wrote: post #49
cyberax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that pure structured programming just sucks. It doesn't have a good answers for cleanups or error handling. Structured programming was the answer to the earlier mess with unstructured gotos, but in the process of trying to improve it, structured programming became just as messy when taken dogmatically. In real life, what matters is the mental load. Every ambient condition that you need to track adds me…

> Every ambient condition that you need to track adds mental load Thus it's wise to limit the complexity of your code. If it starts getting difficult, it might be time to break it down in smaller, more understandable, pieces.

"Limit" how? I suggest looking at any real code in Oberon that has to deal with the real world.

E.g. a USB driver.

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

#93

Post by pjmlp »

cyberax wrote: post #88
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are overlooking that Oberon is from 1992, and modern versions of Oberon like Active Oberon, do support exceptions and many other modern programming language features that Go designers still ignore to this day.

Unfortunately just like the authors did in 1972, they are keen ignoring other languages learnings.

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

#94

Post by elch »

pjmlp wrote: post #93
cyberax wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are overlooking that Oberon is from 1992, and modern versions of Oberon like Active Oberon, do support exceptions and many other modern programming language features that Go designers still ignore to this day. Unfortunately just like the authors did in 1972, they are keen ignoring other languages learnings.

Did you mean the C authors?

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

#95

Post by nothinkjustai »

wk_end wrote: post #86
nothinkjustai wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I like how you assumed I’m American because I don’t have knowledge of international top ranking technical schools.

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 further explanation. Not everybody lives in Europe or has knowledge of what the top technical schools are (which is a bit classist to assume tbh), and this type of Euro-centric thinking doesn’t work very well when communicating with people from other backgrounds.

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

#96

Post by tengwar2 »

cyberax wrote: post #89
tengwar2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes - but that's the gauges you are taking as standard. In fact narrow gauge railways are pretty common, since they are easier and cheaper to put through some landscapes. But as for main line high speed / high load railways, the balance of cost vs utility usually works out the same. Another major effect is standardisation in Victorian Britain (which is why Brunel's gauge on the GWR was replaced). Those engineers went out in to the wider world, and took standard gauge with them, and often the locomotives were manufactured in Britain. Hence the long distance railways often use exactly the same gauge - but the exact measurement was a matter of Parliament deciding on what compromise to draw based on early railway lines, bearing in mind that it was a lot easier to reduce gauge rather than increase it.

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

#97

Post by cyberax »

tengwar2 wrote: post #96
cyberax wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes - but that's the gauges you are taking as standard. In fact narrow gauge railways are pretty common, since they are easier and cheaper to put through some landscapes. But as for main line high speed / high load railways, the balance of cost vs utility usually works out the same. Another major effect is standardisation in Victorian Britain (which is why Brunel's gauge on the GWR was replaced). Those engineers went…

But this doesn't really contradict the myth. You certainly can have rail gauges that are _smaller_ than two horses' asses. You don't _have_ to use all the available width all the time.

It's the lack of something significantly larger that matters for this myth.

> Hence the long distance railways often use exactly the same gauge - but the exact measurement was a matter of Parliament deciding on what compromise to draw based on early railway lines, bearing in mind that it was a lot easier to reduce gauge rather than increase it.

The Russian railway was specifically designed to be incompatible with others (it's slightly larger) to make it harder for invading forces to use it. But even then it was not that much different from others.

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

#98

Post by cxr »

wk_end wrote: post #86
nothinkjustai wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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

The first sentence of the README says, "This project modernizes the Kernel of Oberon System 3 (version 2.3.7) by migrating it from the original Oberon Boot Loader (OBL, written in assembler) to the Multiboot specification (handled in Oberon directly in the Kernel)."

Armed with that and the headline "Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3", it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system (shown here of being capable of running on a Raspberry Pi). It doesn't require prior familiarity with Oberon, despite what the previous commenter said.

Neither you nor the original questioner are being particularly rational about this.

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

#99

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
musicale wrote: post #32

Does Oberon still require capitalized keywords? That always seemed to be emphasizing the wrong thing: IF disaster THEN abort;

Yes, like Modula-2 as well. However, people always forget we don't program in Notepad, rather programmer editors that are able to do automatic capitalisation of keywords. It is a non problem, like discussion of parentheses or white space in programming languages that require them.

How does automatic capitalization solve the EMPHASIS problem ?

For that matter, how do syntax-aware editors solve the problem of finding significant spaces (Python) or parentheses (Lisp) unintuitive, confusing, or simply unpleasant?

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

#100

Post by musicale »

pjmlp wrote: post #67
tengwar2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the editor in this environment do automatic capitalisation? I have to say that when I used Modula-2, editors were very simple and banging away on the shift key or caps lock was a real irritation.

Not directly if I remember correctly, but there are OS formatting tools. Windows IDE tooling for Modula-2, or using something like XEmacs/Emacs or Brief.

> OS formatting tools. Not directly if I remember correctly, but there are OS formatting tools

I would call that an extra compiler pass to fix the SHOUTING syntax.

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