Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oberon (2009)

ignorethecode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 149 posts

Re: Oberon (2009)

#71

Post by nightpool »

lproven wrote: post #43
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…

Kind of a strange thing to mention in the title given that it doesn't show up anywhere in the article at all (which is entirely about the UI/UX)

Re: Oberon (2009)

#72

Post by samatman »

gostsamo wrote: post #65
mwcampbell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Check the prices of braille displays though.

ETH Zürich can afford them.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#73

Post by Shacklz »

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…

> that he really focused on invariants

Oh the horror those classes were. Meyer is a great guy, and in hindsight I appreciate his ideas quite a bit. But the idea to take Eiffel for an introductory course, the questionable exercises (being encouraged/forced to write the code twice, once as invariant and once for the actual execution) plus the terrible Eiffel-IDE made those classes very easy to loathe.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#74

Post by nivethan »

pjmlp wrote: post #49

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.

As someone with wide eyed wonder at Bell Labs what languages/OSes would you recommend to get as far away from the unix world?

Re: Oberon (2009)

#75

Post by Shacklz »

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).

You probably had some classes with Gutknecht at some point, who apparently contributed significantly to Oberon.

That being said, I'm in the same boat as you. I have definitely heard more about Oberon here on HN than at ETHZ.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#76

Post by lproven »

nightpool wrote: post #71
lproven wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kind of a strange thing to mention in the title given that it doesn't show up anywhere in the article at all (which is entirely about the UI/UX)

The article is the best introduction and overview I know. There are many more comprehensive sites.

The revival is worth a look:

http://www.projectoberon.com/

This academic paper is highly readable and interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704806

Wikibooks has excellent docs in depth:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon

But I often cite the Ignore the Code post when someone doesn't know what Oberon is. I used it in a comment elsewhere on HN, and thought "why not submit it?" and here we are. The word "language" wouldn't fit in the title, AFAICR.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#77

Post by mhd »

gtirloni wrote: post #57
mhd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing one step here, as the "next Pascal" was Oberon's predecessor Modula-2. For which there were some 8/16-bit compilers around, including a Turbo Modula-2 . Didn't seem to work out back than for a few reasons, one probably simply being that "Pascal" had a certain name recognition. Also, OO was coming around which Modula-2 didn't have, and by the time Oberon was invented, Object Pacal was already a thing.

I remember being impressed by Modula-3 back then. I wish it wasn't so difficult to compile the compiler.

Ah, Modula-3, one of my perennial favorites. Definitely a different continuation of Modula-2 than Wirth's own Oberon. Agree on the tooling issues. If it would've "sold" better, so many languages of the last two decades could've been avoided.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#78

Post by pjmlp »

ekidd wrote: post #53
pjmlp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that my ideal CS education would include 3 things: 1. "We're going to ask you to build real software, with real tools, in a group. Even if it's only for one course." 2. "We're going to ask you to do some theory and write some proofs." 3. "We're going to show you some wild stuff that looks like it belongs on an alternate timeline." (3) might be something like Oberon, or Racket, or some eccentric faculty projec…

Well, that is how CS is mostly taught in European universities, across their software engineering degrees.

For those that want CS theory only, there is applied mathematics into computation majors.

Re: Oberon (2009)

#80

Post by pjmlp »

nivethan wrote: post #74
pjmlp wrote: post #49

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.

As someone with wide eyed wonder at Bell Labs what languages/OSes would you recommend to get as far away from the unix world?

Plenty, http://progtools.org/article_new.php?name=safe_systems&secti...

Or you can start with Burroughs, VAX/VMS, Mesa/Cedar, Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, IBM i, z/OS.

Post reply on HN