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Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

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Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#21

Post by leecommamichael »

Rochus wrote: post #14
leecommamichael wrote: post #10

When I see these subjects, I can't help but talk about the Odin Programming Language. It's been such a joy working nearly exclusively in Odin this year. The creator of Odin might have something interesting to say on this topic. vidarh said "Wirth was perhaps too ascetic in his insistence on keeping the compilers minimal, but you can fine less extreme versions carried on in extensions done in the PhD dissertations of…

> feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos. While Odin is a modern and capable language, it belongs to the "C-alternative" school (alongside Zig) rather than the "Wirthian" school (Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon). Odin, by design, retains manual memory management and allows pointer arithmetic. Oberon has a GC and very restricted pointer use. Odin's "joy" and "practicality" come from adding many…

I see what you're saying, and it's true that C's design guides Odin's in a large way. A more precise way to word things may have been "inspired by" rather than "with" Wirth's design ethos. In Odin's case, I do think there's quite a lot of design area reduced in not having a GC, which is no small amount of complexity to skip.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#22

Post by mikethe »

mikethe wrote: post #20
Rochus wrote: post #11

> about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents? It's a completely different language with different focus and features. "better" depends on the requirements you want to solve with the language. Rust can do memory management at compile time whereas Oberon and its descendants (such as my Oberon+ version) use a garbage collector at runtime. Rust is much bigger and more complex than Oberon, but…

OO is a big issue here. Or rather, in general. I have read "The Art of Unix Programming", where a very big fuss is made over object-orientation. It's like they want to take a really big gun that means big business, and shoot it. Ever since reading that, I yelp whenever I see it mentioned, and squint in suspicion at the offender. So when a titan like Wirth endorses it.. ..there is obviously something of great importan…

To clarify, you obviously understand OO better than most, certainly much much much better than I do. I happen to have Wirth's book on oberon here, have started reading it. So possibly, eventually, I will reach your level. :-)

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#23

Post by zerr »

Rochus wrote: post #16
andsoitis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that Wirth neither designed Ada nor is Ada in the direct Wirth line (Algol -> Pascal -> Modula 2 -> Oberon), but I think of Ada is very much a parallel branch (Algol -> Ada) and Wirth-influenced, but I would defer to your expertise. Maybe the biggest difference between Ada and true Wirth languages is that it is not deliberately minimal. Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically, but i…

Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax. Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "…

I wish it had a C-like symbolic syntax as opposed to the prose-like one. I believe it would have been adopted more widely.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#24

Post by Rochus »

mikethe wrote: post #20
Rochus wrote: post #11

> about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents? It's a completely different language with different focus and features. "better" depends on the requirements you want to solve with the language. Rust can do memory management at compile time whereas Oberon and its descendants (such as my Oberon+ version) use a garbage collector at runtime. Rust is much bigger and more complex than Oberon, but…

OO is a big issue here. Or rather, in general. I have read "The Art of Unix Programming", where a very big fuss is made over object-orientation. It's like they want to take a really big gun that means big business, and shoot it. Ever since reading that, I yelp whenever I see it mentioned, and squint in suspicion at the offender. So when a titan like Wirth endorses it.. ..there is obviously something of great importan…

Raymond argues in the referenced book that while OOP has value in specific domains, its benefits have been oversold and its typical usage often conflicts with the core Unix philosophy of simplicity and transparency. I think that's a valid position, and hyping and overselling is a continuous fad in the programming industry, which is famously susceptible to what Fred Brooks called the "Silver Bullet" syndrome: the desperate search for a single magical technology that will solve the inherent difficulties of software engineering. The "simplicity and transparency" Raymond champions are indeed virtues, but they are also slogans used to rally a specific community. Just as "Memory Safety" is the rallying cry for Rust today, "Small is Beautiful" was the rallying cry for Unix in the 1970s.

The industry seems to advance not by finding a static "truth," but by lurching between opposing philosophies, each powered by its own wave of activism. I recommend to ignore the "moral" arguments, but to focus on the engineering trade-offs. Most "revolutions" are just rediscoveries of old ideas. Functional Programming is largely Lisp (1958) re-branded. The "Anti-OO" movement is partly a return to procedural modularity (Pascal/C). Our job is not to be "pure"; your job is to build working, maintainable software using the best tools we can find for the specific problem at hand.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#25

Post by Rochus »

zerr wrote: post #23
Rochus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax. Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "…

I wish it had a C-like symbolic syntax as opposed to the prose-like one. I believe it would have been adopted more widely.

Ada follows another philosophy than C and many developers. The 1979 Ada Rationale explicitly states "Readability is more important than writability". Jean Ichbiah, the creator of Ada, explained in an interview that "even if it takes a little longer to write it, it is far more important that a program be readable than writable. For 20 years after the program is written, programmers will have to read it to maintain it." This contrasts with the "fire and forget" attitude of many developers, which often manifests as a "write-once" culture, where the primary goal is to get the logic into the machine as quickly as possible, with little regard for the human who must read it later.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#26

Post by zerr »

Rochus wrote: post #25
zerr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it had a C-like symbolic syntax as opposed to the prose-like one. I believe it would have been adopted more widely.

Ada follows another philosophy than C and many developers. The 1979 Ada Rationale explicitly states "Readability is more important than writability". Jean Ichbiah, the creator of Ada, explained in an interview that " even if it takes a little longer to write it, it is far more important that a program be readable than writable. For 20 years after the program is written, programmers will have to read it to maintain it…

The irony is that symbol-based concise code is much easier to read and comprehend compared to blobs of text. Even replacing Do/Begin/End-s with curly braces would help a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#27

Post by Rochus »

zerr wrote: post #26
Rochus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada follows another philosophy than C and many developers. The 1979 Ada Rationale explicitly states "Readability is more important than writability". Jean Ichbiah, the creator of Ada, explained in an interview that " even if it takes a little longer to write it, it is far more important that a program be readable than writable. For 20 years after the program is written, programmers will have to read it to maintain it…

The irony is that symbol-based concise code is much easier to read and comprehend compared to blobs of text. Even replacing Do/Begin/End-s with curly braces would help a lot.

This is a common belief among experienced programmers, but it is largely contradicted by empirical science, especially when discussing novices or general maintainability. First, it is not only about syntax, but also about the possibility to explicate the actual intent of the code. Ada offers special syntax for almost every conceivable use case, allowing developers to clearly express their intentions in the code so that others can understand them. And there are also scientific studies which clearly show that explicit words significantly outperform symbol-heavy languages (e.g. https://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/An_Empirical_Investigation..., https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1668029/FULLTEXT..., https://www.ime.usp.br/~gerosa/papers/ICPC2018-Legibility.pd...).

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#28

Post by Rochus »

andsoitis wrote: post #17
Rochus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax. Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "…

I see. Thanks for your explanation.

> Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically

In the Rationale for the Design of the Ada Programming Language (published as SIGPLAN Notices, June 1979), the design team explicitly lists their influences. Mesa (a language developed at Xerox PARC, where Wirth made his sabbaticals) is cited as a source for the module/package concept. Modula (referring to Modula-1, 1977) is cited in the context of concurrency and low-level hardware access (e.g., handling interrupts, device drivers), and for the general concept of the module as a syntactic unit. From the timeline we can assume that Modula-2 had not arrived at the design team when they released their proposal to the DoD. Notably, Wirth had actually submitted his own proposal to the DoD (the "Yellow" language, via SRI in 1977), though he withdrew it early because he felt the requirements were too complex. Unfortunately, no public specification of the "Yellow" language exists, but it was very likely not Modula-2.

Re: Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

#29

Post by mikethe »

Rochus wrote: post #24
mikethe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OO is a big issue here. Or rather, in general. I have read "The Art of Unix Programming", where a very big fuss is made over object-orientation. It's like they want to take a really big gun that means big business, and shoot it. Ever since reading that, I yelp whenever I see it mentioned, and squint in suspicion at the offender. So when a titan like Wirth endorses it.. ..there is obviously something of great importan…

Raymond argues in the referenced book that while OOP has value in specific domains, its benefits have been oversold and its typical usage often conflicts with the core Unix philosophy of simplicity and transparency. I think that's a valid position, and hyping and overselling is a continuous fad in the programming industry, which is famously susceptible to what Fred Brooks called the "Silver Bullet" syndrome: the desp…

"Should be cast in bronze" comes to mind.
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