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One would think that in 2017 we would be using an OS that takes the best ideas from Xerox Park/Star, Oberon and Cloud 9. At least on new devices (like tablets)

One would think that in 2017 we would be using an OS that takes the best ideas from Xerox Park/Star, Oberon and Cloud 9. At least on new devices (like tablets) which don't have to keep backward compatibility.

Santosh83 9y ago
How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? The problem is s/w is built on existing knowledge and in the system programming domain that is C/C++ for the most part, and that's where you'll get man-power to the extent needed to build gargantuan OSes like Windows, MacOS, Linux and so on. And usually good s/w engineering principles were not the predominant factor in the inception of these systems anyway. They were commercially motivated, and hobbyist beginnings. And once you already have a big body of code...
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  That is the general principle that businesses operate on. They condition of their legacy stacks is usually bad, too, with lots of poorly-thought design. Some companies such as Jane St claim hiring people who can quickly pick up unusual languages leads to staff that's better at problem-solving in general. Unlike them, the Oberon and Pascal languages were designed to be simpler than what's currently standard for educational purposes. If you know an imperative language, you should be able to learn an Oberon dialect about as fast as you can read the syntax. For a more batteries included, see the Component Pascal dialect with Blackbox: http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=home,en-us http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=home,en-us It had some uptake in Russia and embedded. Still a really, niche player for sure but it did. Also, Astrobe has an Oberon IDE and platform for embedded. http://astrobe.com/Oberon.htm http://astrobe.com/Oberon.htm Finally, the most industrial one with longest time would be Free Pascal with Lazarus since it's sort of a Delphi port. http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ IDE training, native libraries available, and ease of integrating C libraries are all I would be concerned about if just trying to crank out features. They'll certainly pick up the language(s) with no trouble at all.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? The problem is s/w is built on existing knowledge and in the system programming domain that is C/C++ for the most part, and that's where you'll get man-power to the extent needed to build gargantuan OSes like Windows, MacOS, Linux and so on. - Put some cool code riddles on the company website that lots of hackers will like so that they will discuss them on Hacker News. - Pay a more than sufficient salary.
- Uehreka 9y ago
  >How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? I'd take this moment to point out that while there existed _some_ Objective-C programmers in 2007, approximately 99% of the current Objective-C programmers in the world (by my wild speculation) learned this bizarre SmallTalky language just to make iOS apps.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yep, before Apple bought NeXT, my only contact with Objective-C was to port a particle visualization framework from dying a Cube into Windows/Visual C++.
- romaniv 9y ago
  Those languages are simple to learn. And it's not necessarily about the language anyway. Also, two of those three operating systems were developed by couple dozen people at most, so you shouldn't need hundreds of programmers, as long as the ones you have are competent.

Santosh83 9y ago

How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? The problem is s/w is built on existing knowledge and in the system programming domain that is C/C++ for the most part, and that's where you'll get man-power to the extent needed to build gargantuan OSes like Windows, MacOS, Linux and so on. And usually good s/w engineering principles were not the predominant factor in the inception of these systems anyway. They were commercially motivated, and hobbyist beginnings. And once you already have a big body of code...

nickpsecurity 9y ago
That is the general principle that businesses operate on. They condition of their legacy stacks is usually bad, too, with lots of poorly-thought design. Some companies such as Jane St claim hiring people who can quickly pick up unusual languages leads to staff that's better at problem-solving in general. Unlike them, the Oberon and Pascal languages were designed to be simpler than what's currently standard for educational purposes. If you know an imperative language, you should be able to learn an Oberon dialect about as fast as you can read the syntax. For a more batteries included, see the Component Pascal dialect with Blackbox: http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=home,en-us http://blackboxframework.org/index.php?cID=home,en-us It had some uptake in Russia and embedded. Still a really, niche player for sure but it did. Also, Astrobe has an Oberon IDE and platform for embedded. http://astrobe.com/Oberon.htm http://astrobe.com/Oberon.htm Finally, the most industrial one with longest time would be Free Pascal with Lazarus since it's sort of a Delphi port. http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ IDE training, native libraries available, and ease of integrating C libraries are all I would be concerned about if just trying to crank out features. They'll certainly pick up the language(s) with no trouble at all.
wolfgke 9y ago
> How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? The problem is s/w is built on existing knowledge and in the system programming domain that is C/C++ for the most part, and that's where you'll get man-power to the extent needed to build gargantuan OSes like Windows, MacOS, Linux and so on. - Put some cool code riddles on the company website that lots of hackers will like so that they will discuss them on Hacker News. - Pay a more than sufficient salary.
Uehreka 9y ago
>How would a large company (or community project) be able to recruit hundreds of programmers well versed in these languages? I'd take this moment to point out that while there existed _some_ Objective-C programmers in 2007, approximately 99% of the current Objective-C programmers in the world (by my wild speculation) learned this bizarre SmallTalky language just to make iOS apps.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yep, before Apple bought NeXT, my only contact with Objective-C was to port a particle visualization framework from dying a Cube into Windows/Visual C++.
romaniv 9y ago
Those languages are simple to learn. And it's not necessarily about the language anyway. Also, two of those three operating systems were developed by couple dozen people at most, so you shouldn't need hundreds of programmers, as long as the ones you have are competent.