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Oberon (2009)

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Re: Oberon (2009)

#41

Post by unnouinceput »

mwcampbell wrote: post #31
samatman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know, serial to usb convertors (and vice-versa) do exists, and are like $5 only.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#42

Post by haspok »

The zooming reminds me of Prezi, except that Prezi is in 3D... (maybe Oberon is where they got their original idea from?).

As interesting as it sounds and looks, I cannot imagine constantly zooming in and out (or panning) just to switch windows. Maybe I am so indoctrinated with the standard Windows task switcher concept that I don't want it to work in any other way. I was also completely lost when I tried to create a Prezi presentation instead of Powerpoint.

On the other hand it is great to see something different in the UI world. I remember only one such other concept that didn't make it into mainstream: the UI where you just move the mouse, but don't need to click...

Re: Oberon (2009)

#43

Post by lproven »

nightpool wrote: post #28

What does "HLL" stand for here? Wikipedia offers "High-level language", but I can't quite get that to fit in this context.

Yes, high-level language. (I submitted this post & wrote the title.)

Oberon is both the programming language and the operating system, including the IDE and the compiler and the UI.

"Oberon" is the name of the whole thing, and it's about 30K LOC in total. The entire thing is smaller than a typical Linux console-mode text editor.

The original OS -- that is the entire thing, from kernel to tiling UI to compiler -- was about 12K LOC: http://www.edm2.com/0608/oberon.html

The compiler is about 4K LOC: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/oberon.html

In Linux terms it is hard to even comprehend how tiny this OS is.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#44

Post by lproven »

romwell wrote: post #37

Never heard of? Come on! It's the most interesting thing yet to happen in desktop computing.

I personally tend to agree with you, and yet, as a researcher and writer about OSes and so on, I never even heard of it until a few years ago. It is, sadly, quite obscure.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#46

Post by alexisread »

nightpool wrote: post #28

What does "HLL" stand for here? Wikipedia offers "High-level language", but I can't quite get that to fit in this context.

It does mean high level language, and in this context it's trying to illustrate that Oberon is used to write the OS and drivers, despite having GC, a repl, objects and other high-level constructs (compare with C for example).

The general assumption is that if you don't have exact control over memory and threading, you can't write an OS.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#47

Post by butterisgood »

This seems to talk about the variant called Active Oberon. It’s an interesting and expressive language that’s fairly active.

It can run native or hosted. It can build binaries for your host or for Oberon itself. The Fox compiler is pretty neat!

Re: Oberon (2009)

#48

Post by pdubroy »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #45

The text-based UI reminds me of the Acme text editor from Plan 9 (it’s now also available for other OS so easy to try) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

Acme was inspired by Oberon, and Oberon was inspired by a system called Cedar[1] which was created at Xerox PARC.

From "Acme, A User Interface for Programmers"[2] by Rob Pike:

> Cedar was, however, the major inspiration for Oberon [Wirt89], a system of similar scope but much smaller scale. Through careful selection of Cedar’s ideas, Oberon shows that its lessons can be applied to a small, coherent system that can run efficiently on modest hardware. In fact, Oberon probably errs too far towards simplicity: a single-process system with weak networking, it seems an architectural throwback.

> Acme is a new program, a combined window system, editor, and shell, that applies some of the ideas distilled by Oberon. Where Oberon uses objects and modules within a programming language (also called Oberon), Acme uses files and commands within an existing operating system (Plan 9). Unlike Oberon, Acme has does not yet have support for graphical output, just text. At least for now, the work on Acme has concentrated on producing the smoothest user interface possible for a programmer at work.

[1]: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1...

[2]: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

Re: Oberon (2009)

#49

Post by pjmlp »

I surely have used it, during 1996 - 2000.

Thanks to Oberon I learned what is possible to achieve with GC enabled systems programming languages, it was this experience to lead me to play archeology on our library, Usenet, gopher, FTP,.. and discover what the world of programming languages outside Bell Labs actually like.

Young pupil fell astray from UNIX church never to look into it again with the same wonder.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#50

Post by pjmlp »

flwidmer wrote: post #39
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 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.

Yet those are the kind of things universities are great, one get to learn about technologies that changes one's point of view (ideally), something that self taught or professional schools hardly achieve.
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