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Oberon (2009)

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Re: Oberon (2009)

#31

Post by mwcampbell »

samatman wrote: post #29
mwcampbell wrote: post #24

> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. I wonder if any blind students, or other disabled people who need accessibility tools, had to confront the general lack of accessibility in simple, niche GUI systems such as this one. I suppose someone could have been given the assignment to extend Oberon with a screen reader or other accessibility tool, ideally withou…

It seems (and this surprises me not at all) that this was addressed in 1998 in Linz, Austria: https://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/Us_Eu/conf/csun_99/sessio...

Very cool, and forgive me for not doing more research myself. Also, I should have thought of using a Braille display instead of a speech synthesizer, since for that, all they would have had to do is send commands to a device connected to a serial port. Of course, that would be more complicated now with USB, never mind Bluetooth.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#32

Post by fm77 »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #4
Koshkin wrote: post #3

I remember trying out an Oberon-07 compiler some years back. The speed at which it worked was impressive: it was able to build itself and the standard library modules in a small fraction of a second.

Pascal family languages parse quickly because they won't let you use anything before it's defined.

Well, not really. Consider the following:

  type
      ItemPtr = ^Item;

      SomeOtherType = record
        a,b,c:integer;
      end;

      Item = record
        Data:string;
        Next:ItemPtr;
      end;
The first time the parser hits "Item", its not defined.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#34

Post by bluelu »

ThePadawan wrote: post #19
mhd wrote: post #8

> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. The article being from 2009, this must've been an interesting period for the students, as back then the introductory programming course was using Eiffel, taught by Bertrand Meyer himself.

My 0.02CHF: I studied at ETHZ from 2008 to 2015, and I've heard about Oberon once or twice back then, and read about it at least twice that much on HN. Never used it, never knew anyone who used it, never knew anyone who worked on it (though I believe the chair had slots for theses available at the time).

I graduated 2007 at the ETHZ.

When I started studying, some student pcs were even running Oberon (no login was required). Only some IT students used them as it was too complicated for students from other departments. They were then later replaced with linux/windows machines.

If my memory serves me right, when you bought a laptop through the university neptun program, you had oberon preinstalled too (or at least a dvd to install it) was provided.

As for Bertrand Meyer, I also visited his programming class. I still remember that he really focused on invariants, and you had to write each code line basically twice.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#35

Post by slim »

ekidd wrote: post #27

Not only have I heard of Oberon, I've written code for it! The Oberon programming language is a nicer-than-average descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. The compiler was reasonably fast even in the 90s. The UI was strange enough to feel really interesting. As the article mentions, you could type a command anywhere and click it. And the older version I used had tiling windows, although this seems to have changed. But one…

Also the whole OS was a 1.44' bootable floppy disk which booted in 10 seconds on a 486

Re: Oberon (2009)

#38

Post by goatsneez »

ekidd wrote: post #27

Not only have I heard of Oberon, I've written code for it! The Oberon programming language is a nicer-than-average descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. The compiler was reasonably fast even in the 90s. The UI was strange enough to feel really interesting. As the article mentions, you could type a command anywhere and click it. And the older version I used had tiling windows, although this seems to have changed. But one…

FYI, a flavor of Oberon will also fly to space soon it turns out...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03404v1

Re: Oberon (2009)

#39

Post by flwidmer »

ThePadawan wrote: post #19
mhd wrote: post #8

> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. The article being from 2009, this must've been an interesting period for the students, as back then the introductory programming course was using Eiffel, taught by Bertrand Meyer himself.

My 0.02CHF: I studied at ETHZ from 2008 to 2015, and I've heard about Oberon once or twice back then, and read about it at least twice that much on HN. Never used it, never knew anyone who used it, never knew anyone who worked on it (though I believe the chair had slots for theses available at the time).

I was there from 2006 to 2012. The OS course (I think that's third or fourth semester) was being taught with Active Oberon. Must have been in 2007 or 2008, so might have changed right after. Eiffel, Oberon, Event-B are just the most notable examples of things that we were being taught that have never become mainstream.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#40

Post by flwidmer »

bluelu wrote: post #34
ThePadawan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 0.02CHF: I studied at ETHZ from 2008 to 2015, and I've heard about Oberon once or twice back then, and read about it at least twice that much on HN. Never used it, never knew anyone who used it, never knew anyone who worked on it (though I believe the chair had slots for theses available at the time).

I graduated 2007 at the ETHZ. When I started studying, some student pcs were even running Oberon (no login was required). Only some IT students used them as it was too complicated for students from other departments. They were then later replaced with linux/windows machines. If my memory serves me right, when you bought a laptop through the university neptun program, you had oberon preinstalled too (or at least a dvd…

Mandatory reference: https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/ I'm sure everyone who was in his classes played this game :D
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