Oberon, a delightfully insane system
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Oberon, a delightfully insane system
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#2I feel like this is an excellent example of what happens when you include the right abstractions in your software from the get go. Very very very cool how just a few simple ideas avoid a whole bunch of usability issues that mainstream OSes are only now starting to address.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#3Neat stuff. Jef Raskin explores a number of these ideas (ZUIs, command-lines-everywhere, etc.) in his book The Humane Interface. Some really cool ideas about UI design.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#4The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/), a Unix port of Acme (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other programs than Emacs does.)
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#5I said this and I will say it again. Oberon, the language, is the most delightful little thing to write a compiler for. Even more so in s-exp syntax. The canonical implementation is described in a 40 page tutorial by the MASTER himself, Wirth :-)
People interested in alternative desktop and GUI environments should also look at all the biproduct research that came out of Plan9 (NB: there is a programming language called "Squeak" somewhere in there, it's not the smalltalk, but something C-ish invented by Rob Pike hacked on by the usual Bell Labs suspects :-)
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#6I said this and I will say it again. Oberon, the language, is the most delightful little thing to write a compiler for. Even more so in s-exp syntax. The canonical implementation is described in a 40 page tutorial by the MASTER himself, Wirth :-) People interested in alternative desktop and GUI environments should also look at all the biproduct research that came out of Plan9 (NB: there is a programming language call…
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Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#7Anyone here use Sugar as their primary desktop-environment?
I don't know much about Oberon other than this article and it was founded at the school he graduated from, but Sugar seems like the most modern and feasible alternative to a GUI akin to something like this.
Oberon V4 appears to be orphaned, there are almost no changes since 2000. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_operating_system
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#8It's a little hard to tell from those screenshots,but it looks like Oberon's text-based interface could have been influenced by the Xerox PARC Cedar environment or possibly the XDE/Tajo environment that Xerox used internally to develop the Xerox Star. Cedar would be the more likely guess because Wirth spent time at PARC.
Modula 2 was influenced by the Mesa language developed at PARC and used to develop the Star and various PARC projects.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#9What's insane about it? It's brilliant!
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#10It's a little hard to tell from those screenshots,but it looks like Oberon's text-based interface could have been influenced by the Xerox PARC Cedar environment or possibly the XDE/Tajo environment that Xerox used internally to develop the Xerox Star. Cedar would be the more likely guess because Wirth spent time at PARC. Modula 2 was influenced by the Mesa language developed at PARC and used to develop the Star and v…
It was influenced by Cedar. IIRC, Oberon was described as a simplified successor to Cedar, with an initial usable implementation from the kernel and language up designed and created in 3 years by 2 people.
See the "Project Oberon" section in "A Plea For Lean Software" (cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf)