Oberon is a gift to the computing world. It is one of the few examples of a top-to-bottom design of a full computing system (The Smalltalk Blue Book is also lik

Oberon is a gift to the computing world. It is one of the few examples of a top-to-bottom design of a full computing system (The Smalltalk Blue Book is also like this, sans the hardware). I think the world is ready, or almost ready, for a comeback in this kind of design. Given that we have so many open, compatible standards (JSON, Office Documents/XML, hell even TCP/IP, etc, etc), the "traditional" problems of esoteric systems and their incompatibilities with each other, like we had back in the late 80s and 90s, seem to melt away. We are at a point where we can and should be experimenting with completely new systems from the ground up. Otherwise we will never get anything new, and everything will just be some iteration of Unix for the rest of time -- like medieval scholastics endlessly debating Aristotle and not discovering anything truly novel.