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I dont exactly remember who said it, perhaps Andrei Alexandrescu, that only a few other than Nicholas Wirth epitomizes this drive to perfect something with a pe
by srean 15y ago
I dont exactly remember who said it, perhaps Andrei Alexandrescu, that only a few other than Nicholas Wirth epitomizes this drive to perfect something with a persistent passion. Throwing away valiant efforts and starting from the beginning again and again. He designed Algol(W), Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon..Oberon-2. I know none of these languages enough to know how much their feature sets overlap, but it indeed seems exceptional
- oconnor0 15y agoWhy was this downvoted? This seems to be a relevant addition to the discussion of Oberon & its history.
- da02 15y agoSomeone else suggested (on another HN thread) it might be an accident when someone is reading it on a smartphone and touch interface.
- JamesBlair 15y agoI still don't get why we can't retract and change votes.
- cpeterso 15y agoMaybe HN should have larger buttons when serving touch devices.
- wazoox 15y agoOh yes please. Either that or the ability to change the vote afterwards.
- cpeterso 15y agoIf you're a fan of Niklaus Wirth, I recommend The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity, a book of essays by Wirth's colleagues and students about some of his work. http://www.amzn.com/dp/1558607234/ http://www.amzn.com/dp/1558607234/
- mahmud 15y agoAlgol(W) comes from the messy world of Algol standardization, has its tails in the early days of mainframe programming, before structured programming was fully crystallized, and the modern epoch. Pascal is a clean up of the early Algol efforts, with committee-designs removed for the service of CS students. What remained is an excellent academic language that increasingly had to bow to industry pressures to be "C-like". Original Pascal was compiled to byte-code, often interpreted, but by the 80s many Pascals had inline assembly language extensions, OS-specific hooks and other artifacts of systems programming. Modula is a much as Wirth's as type-theorists who really created its foundations, it's far bigger than a one man effort. Modula also saw tremendous funding & industry support, until it was "eclipsed" by Ada. Oberon is the Scheme-sized Algol dialect. It's a tiny little programming language, with its own tiny graphical operating system, tiny compiler, etc. Closest thing to an "AlgolM" (I'm sure he took more than a hint from the Lisp school.) Oberon is his meditation on the sublime .. something for future generations. I would love to see an Oberon Laptop Per Child.
- tamberg 15y agoRe OLPC: The Ceres computers built at ETH by N. Wirth between 1985 and 1990 came close. They weren't laptops, but had been designed from the ground up (i.e. hardware, operating system, programming language) to be fully understandable and teachable. The OS was booted from ROM and took only a few seconds to show up on the screen. Project Oberon was documented in the book http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pdf http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pd...