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Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

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Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#51

Post by Rochus »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
Rochus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No magic, just facts, Luke; don't search too long; look at the introductory sections of "Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" (ACM 1992), "The Oberon Companion, A Guide to Using and Programming Oberon System 3" (vdf 1998), and Gutknecht, J (1994): Oberon System 3: Vision of a Future Software Technology, Springer, Software.

Thanks for proving me right it would be a waste of time. See, this could have been a healthy discussion about Oberon, instead it went sour.

Learning is never a waste of time.

Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#52

Post by cxr »

Rochus wrote: post #29
eterps wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He kept on "reducing complexity" while re-building what is essentially the same, rather primitive, language. ANd he kept throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What is interesting about Oberon is that it is a complete (i.e. OS + compiler + HW) usable system that can be understood in its entirety by a single human being within one lifetime. As far as I know it's also the only system currently in existence that fu…

> What is interesting about Oberon is that it is a complete (i.e. OS + compiler + HW) ... the only system currently in existence that fullfills that promise. Well, Unix including the C programming language were essentially implemented by two guys (Thompson und Ritchie); at least in the beginning Unix was small enough to "be understood in its entirety by a single human being within one lifetime". The same applies to L…

  You are not expected to understand this.

Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#53

Post by [deleted] »

Rochus wrote: post #47
timbit42 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golang is the admission by the creators of B, C, Unix, and Plan-9, that Wirth was right.

This is a rather bold claim given that the most obvious influence was the method syntax of Oberon-2 (designed by H.P. Mössenböck, the PhD supervisor of R. Griesemer), and besides that there are only some superficial similarities between Oberon and Go. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32303837 .

[deleted]

Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#54

Post by Rochus »

cxr wrote: post #52
Rochus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is interesting about Oberon is that it is a complete (i.e. OS + compiler + HW) ... the only system currently in existence that fullfills that promise. Well, Unix including the C programming language were essentially implemented by two guys (Thompson und Ritchie); at least in the beginning Unix was small enough to "be understood in its entirety by a single human being within one lifetime". The same applies to L…

You are not expected to understand this.

That even works with much smaller code bases; I remember staring at half a page of image processing code for a week.

Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#55

Post by vitiral »

Sin2x wrote: post #33
vitiral wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golang is not an OS. Golang doesn't fit in 12kib of source code. I could go on.

Oberon language and Oberon OS are two distinct entities and given the context of this post it's obvious that I was talking about Oberon the language. Whether you like Go or not, it's the closest modern production language to Oberon and derived very much from it, so my point stands.

Ah, you're speaking of just the language. I've actually read a bit of the Oberon book and had no idea Golang was inspired by it. Good to know, since I consider both an inspiration for my own projects!

Re: Modula-2 and Oberon (2007) [pdf]

#56

Post by vitiral »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
Rochus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any case, Oberon's best days are behind it Maybe if you insist that parallel processing is part of the language (which you likely do if you prefer Active Oberon). Personally I think this can be well delegated to libraries to keep the language simple. Oberon+ doesn't use dedicated syntax even for exception handling; also "green" or regular threads, and channels and the like can well be covered by libraries or FFI…

The whole point of Oberon was the Smalltalk like experience, or to be more precise Mesa/Cedar like experience. So to offer a bare bones language in 2022 without an OS that is at least at the same level of Blue Bottle, let alone what consumers expect from a modern OS is really not attainable. It remains a nice language to look at as language nerd, and at the end of the day, pick something else when delivering software…

I don't think I have the breadth of your knowledge, so I would really love any thoughts you had on the language/OS I'm creating, github.com/civboot/fngi.

It's partly inspired from Oberon (although I started it without knowing about Oberon), but I'm still working my way through the book and language as I develop my own. I'm sure it's going to a decade+ project to have something valuable, but I'm hungry for any feedback I can get at this early stage.

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