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PDF is thirty years old, and this is like the Third or fourth post on Oberon in the past few weeks so just wondering why the love? I mean as a study in programm

• pjmlp 3y ago
  Imagine being in the mid-1990s, Windows 3.x is what most people use on the PC, Windows 95 is around the corner. Here is a full workstation graphical OS, programmed in a memory safe systems programming language, with automatic memory management. The language is compiled to native code, originally, eventually the system will evolve to a mixed AOT/JIT workflow. The OS is heavily based on the ideas from Xerox PARC, primarly in Mesa/Cedar[0][1], and brings them into the normal PCs, specially with Native Oberon. A mix of dynamic loading, REPL and mouse commands, gives an experience similar to Lisp Machines/Smalltalk (like in Cedar). Basically any public symbol from a module, can be called from the shell, or via the mouse, and act upon selected text, selected window, widget or take additional input. When modules are changed and reloaded this affects the whole OS, similar to those Xerox environments. Rob Pike actually became quite a fan, hence with Rio and ACME in Plan 9 are heavily influenced by how Oberon (the OS works), and also carried into Inferno/Limbo afterwards. All of this when outside Xerox PARC and ETHZ, almost everyone was discussing about writing OSes in C (with exception of Apple and Object Pascal, later C++). The closest you would get to it today, is how Powershell alongside .NET and COM permeate Windows, and even that fails short as that is only userspace. This is why many of us relate so much to Oberon, even if it doesn't make sense in 2023, an alternative universe of systems programming in GC based languages, coupled with a Lisp Machines/Smalltalk like experience. [0] - https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/347/1860 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3... [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    > Imagine being in the mid-1990s, Windows 3.x is what most people use on the PC, Windows 95 is around the corner. Anyone recalls how slow and clunky Java applets were back then? I think we all know why Oberon was ultimately less than successful. Of course, the missing ingredient back in the 1990s was memory safety without relying on GC, what Cyclone gives you and what was further developed by Rust.
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      Those Java applets were interpreted, and had nothing to do with Oberon. If you never used it, don't assume.
• lboasso 3y ago
  I think Fogus was able to summarize it quite well in his "Six works of Computer Science-Fiction" blog post [0]: "Wirth’s magnum opus is the quintessential example of Computer Science alternative-history world-building." Note that Oberon was not only the name of a programming language, it was also the name of an innovative (at that time) operating system. It is possible to program real-world programs today in Oberon depending on the used implementation. For example oberonc [1] is a compiler targeting the JVM and allows you to leverage the JVM ecosystem by invoking Java code (or any other language that compiles to Java bytecode). For more Oberon implementations see [2] [0] http://blog.fogus.me/2015/04/27/six-works-of-computer-science-fiction/ http://blog.fogus.me/2015/04/27/six-works-of-computer-scienc... [1] https://github.com/lboasso/oberonc https://github.com/lboasso/oberonc [2] http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml http://oberon07.com/compilers.xhtml
  • 082349872349872 3y ago
    > it was also the name of an innovative (at that time) operating system it was also an example of a complete system (from hw through os + dev tools to apps) which had been developed by only two people. I thoroughly enjoyed Wirth's excuse for an FPGA re-implementation: "no commercial machines would talk to my favourite mouse —given to me as a parting gift from my Xerox sabbatical— so I built a workstation that would" (He once gave a slideshow of the workstations he'd designed over the years, and although the displays got bigger, and the cpu and storage got smaller, the mouse remained the same...)
  • cxr 3y ago
    > an innovative (at that time) operating system The UI paradigm involving Oberon's "system track" is still really interesting. This isn't fanfare. I put some serious hours into messing around with Oberon (re-implementing the compiler like you, working on a couple emulators, working out how to bootstrap the system and build a disk image). Still, I never particularly enjoyed using Oberon, though. About a year or so ago, though, while fumbling around with Firefox's bookmarks, I was entertaining the idea of a "universal sidebar" that would from the perspective of any app or web page be entirely separate but would still be sufficiently powerful to control any one (or all) of them. I realized I was re-imagining Wirth's system track, jotted the idea down, and then moved on. I'm still occasionally reminded of it, of course, due to the same frustrations that led to my daydreaming in the first place. I do most of my computing with browser windows and terminal emulators snapped to either the left or right sides of the screen, anyway, so my existing workflow is entirely amenable to the imposition of parallel tracks. It's an underexplored UI concept on modern desktops. Windows Vista did have a widget engine that it first called the Sidebar and then called Desktop Gadgets, but it it was basically a clone of Konfabulator and the Mac Dashboard and not so much a supercharged window manager/app coordinator in the vein of Oberon or Plan 9 Acme, and I don't use Windows anyhow. The Browser Company is doing something sort of interesting with Arc, but it's still just an application-sidebar and not nearly powerful enough for what I want. Plus it's on the wrong side of the screen.