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Project Oberon

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Re: Project Oberon

#51

Post by renewedrebecca »

elcapitan wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

Totally OT, but I was wondering why you are writing years in 5 digits? :D

Planning ahead.

Re: Project Oberon

#52

Post by kinjba11 »

elcapitan wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

Totally OT, but I was wondering why you are writing years in 5 digits? :D

Perhaps OP should be writing 11976 not 01976

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Re: Project Oberon

#53

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

kragen wrote: post #28
pjmlp wrote: post #7

The Oberon channel has several videos of Oberon in action, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Oberon+Chan... While Oberon was quite cool, people should also learn about its Xerox influence, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Also dive into what happened afterwards, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Zonnon,... Active Oberon could be considered quite modern, also makes the d…

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

There was another sibling of the Lilith:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronos_(computer)

Re: Project Oberon

#54

Post by pjmlp »

kragen wrote: post #42
pjmlp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is mix of Limbo and Oberon-2. I also remember reading somewhere that Wirth found Cedar too powerful, or complex, so Oberon was designed with the goal to be as capable as Cedar environment, while using a simpler language. So not sure which kind of relation I would put them, besides being an inspiration.

Thank you! What are the Oberon-2 features in Golang that aren't in Limbo? I should have clarified the Squeak → Newsqueak → Alef → Limbo → Golang lineage, but from my point of view Newsqueak is already recognizably a version of Golang (and Squeak isn't.)

The way methods are declared (Oberon-2 syntax), the unsafe package (SYSTEM in Oberon) and package initialisation blocks.

Re: Project Oberon

#55

Post by pjmlp »

carapace wrote: post #46
chadcmulligan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The GUI system, especially with the "Gadgets" subsystem, is mind-blowing. It would take too long to go over it at the moment, but there are features there that still haven't made it into mainstream GUI systems. Have you seen Delphi?

Yes. Oberon with Gadgets was like having the capabilities of Delphi live in the GUI. You could literally select widgets and open an inspector tool and edit them. It also had a facility similar to OLE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding ) implemented with message passing. When I said these features still haven't made it into mainstream GUI systems I didn't mean that they weren't represented at…

COM is everywhere on Windows, OLE is just a specific set of COM interfaces.

After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts, they went on replicating the .NET designs for Longhorn in COM instead.

So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM, and WinRT is basically a marketing name for COM 2.0.

Re: Project Oberon

#56

Post by Rochus »

kragen wrote: post #28
pjmlp wrote: post #7

The Oberon channel has several videos of Oberon in action, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Oberon+Chan... While Oberon was quite cool, people should also learn about its Xerox influence, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Also dive into what happened afterwards, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Zonnon,... Active Oberon could be considered quite modern, also makes the d…

To be entirely meticulous about the genealogy, I think Wirth was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa; Lampson first described (Mesa's successor) Cedar in PARC TR CSL-83-15, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, December 01983, and without rereading the report, I think Cedar's development began about 01981. So Cedar is Oberon's sibling, not its parent. The connecting link at ETH between Mesa and Obe…

> was at PARC in 01976, and what inspired him most there was Mesa

Wirth was twice at PARC. In his HOPL3 paper he writes in section 4 "From Modula to Oberon":

"As my sabbatical year at Xerox in 1976/77 had inspired me to design the personal workstation Lilith in conjunction with Modula-2, my second stay in 1984/85 provided the necessary inspiration and motivation for the language and operating system Oberon [29, 30]. Xerox PARC ’s Cedar system for its extremely powerful Dorado computer was based on the windows concept developed also at PARC for Smalltalk. [...] Thus the idea was born of gaining first-hand experience by designing such a modern operating system on my own, with Cedar as the primary source of ideas."

> IIRC Griesemer did his dissertation under Wirth at ETH

His supervisor was actually Prof. Mössenböck, the author of Oberon-2 (from which Go inherited its type-bound procedure syntax), see https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....

Re: Project Oberon

#59

Post by zmix »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
carapace wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Oberon with Gadgets was like having the capabilities of Delphi live in the GUI. You could literally select widgets and open an inspector tool and edit them. It also had a facility similar to OLE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding ) implemented with message passing. When I said these features still haven't made it into mainstream GUI systems I didn't mean that they weren't represented at…

COM is everywhere on Windows, OLE is just a specific set of COM interfaces. After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts, they went on replicating the .NET designs for Longhorn in COM instead. So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM, and WinRT is basically a marketing name for COM 2.0.

> After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts

Why did they do that?

Re: Project Oberon

#60

Post by pjmlp »

zmix wrote: post #59
pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COM is everywhere on Windows, OLE is just a specific set of COM interfaces. After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts, they went on replicating the .NET designs for Longhorn in COM instead. So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM, and WinRT is basically a marketing name for COM 2.0.

> After the Windows team successfully sabotaged Longhorn efforts Why did they do that?

Politics, .NET has always been part of DevTools business unit, while C++ and Windows were under WinDev roof.

Longhorn's goals was to rebuild Windows on top of .NET, naturally there were performance issues with the state of .NET 2.0 capabilities.

However instead of working together , while improving the whole stack (languages and runtime) to make it possible, like Google teams have later done with Android and ChromeOS, they just deemed it impossible and started pushing for a reboot.

When Sinfosky of the Office team took charge (another C++ holdout at MS), they picked up all the Longhorn's ideas redoing them in COM.

It is no surprise how WinRT turned out to be COM 2.0 with him in charge of Windows 8.

https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7f...

"Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT"

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

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