4 ms·

Thanks to Robert Griesemer (Phd student of Prof. Wirth), the Go programming language includes some design lessons taken from the Oberon language

tempodox 9y ago
I would be interested to know what those design lessons are. Is there a writeup of that somewhere?
- lboasso 9y ago
  Wirth wrote many articles about the design of his programming languages, a nice starting point for Oberon/Modula-2 is: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June.pdf http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June....
- pjmlp 9y ago
  For example Go method declarations are taken from Oberon-2. The unsafe package kind of resembles SYSTEM, just that Oberon spec leaves it open the possibility to have Assembly intrisics in SYSTEM, given its goal as systems programming language.
PeachPlum 9y ago
I think that overlooks the contribution of Rob Pike, Russ Cox and others from the Plan 9 community. Plan 9 is very much influenced by Oberon, and the Acme text editor in particular.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
There is also Martin Odersky of Scala fame, pretty sure his advisor was Wirth as well.
_ph_ 9y ago
This is one of several reasons drawing me towards Go. I grew up with Pascal and worked with Modula-2 for quite some time, and have been missing those times ever since. Go seems to really drag most good things from those languages into a modern world.
noir_lord 9y ago
TypeScript gives me a Pascal-vibe at times as well. Occasionally feel like I should be typing `TButton = record`. Not that surprising I guess since Anders Hejlsberg wrote Turbo Pascal, much of Delphi, was the lead dev on C# and TypeScript. He's made a career out of writing productive environments for mortal developers. I still think Pascal was my favourite language, the old joke back then was "Pascal has one way to do everything, the right way" compared to the expressiveness of a lot of languages.
zerr 9y ago
Robert is also the only pro-generics person in the team.

tempodox 9y ago

I would be interested to know what those design lessons are. Is there a writeup of that somewhere?

lboasso 9y ago
Wirth wrote many articles about the design of his programming languages, a nice starting point for Oberon/Modula-2 is: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June.pdf http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-June....
pjmlp 9y ago
For example Go method declarations are taken from Oberon-2. The unsafe package kind of resembles SYSTEM, just that Oberon spec leaves it open the possibility to have Assembly intrisics in SYSTEM, given its goal as systems programming language.

PeachPlum 9y ago

I think that overlooks the contribution of Rob Pike, Russ Cox and others from the Plan 9 community. Plan 9 is very much influenced by Oberon, and the Acme text editor in particular.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

There is also Martin Odersky of Scala fame, pretty sure his advisor was Wirth as well.

_ph_ 9y ago

This is one of several reasons drawing me towards Go. I grew up with Pascal and worked with Modula-2 for quite some time, and have been missing those times ever since. Go seems to really drag most good things from those languages into a modern world.

noir_lord 9y ago

TypeScript gives me a Pascal-vibe at times as well. Occasionally feel like I should be typing `TButton = record`. Not that surprising I guess since Anders Hejlsberg wrote Turbo Pascal, much of Delphi, was the lead dev on C# and TypeScript. He's made a career out of writing productive environments for mortal developers. I still think Pascal was my favourite language, the old joke back then was "Pascal has one way to do everything, the right way" compared to the expressiveness of a lot of languages.

zerr 9y ago

Robert is also the only pro-generics person in the team.