8 ms·

Oberon - The Oberlooked Jewel

54 points by pmarin 15y ago

aw3c2 15y ago
Warning, direct link to PDF. And for some reason it is linked through Google. Direct link is http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf
- pmarin 15y ago
  Thanks. It is strange, the only think I did was to use "Copy link as..." in the contextual menu.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Yeah, Google has started adding redirect cruft to search results in the past year or so, which is pretty annoying when trying to share links.
    - hollerith 15y ago
      Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, Google search results have been that way a lot longer than a year.
      - _delirium 15y ago
        You're right, looks like it's been at least since 2009. I recall they used to not have any redirects, and then they started inserting them randomly, for only maybe 5% of search results. Then at some point they got phased in for all results. Thought that phase-in was more recent, but seems not.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Not really cruft, but a very simple way to measure how relevant was that result for the search you did.
      - gruseom 15y ago
        Simple and valuable to Google, perhaps, but a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. It breaks the web in at least two ways: makes it slower and hides the true links. I hate that they do this. Nothing has been more destructive of the warm feeling I used to have toward Google. I still use them out of habit but eventually irritation and the rise of some credible competitor will coincide and cause me to switch.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        > a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. How exactly improving the relevance of the returned results is not the best for their users? > makes it slower 257 ms here. Not that much compared to the 2 seconds the actual server took to start returning the data. > hides the true links The proper URL is the green line under the title. Here it says "www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf".
        _delirium 15y ago
        > The proper URL is the green line under the title. If the URL is short enough that works fine, but if it's longer you can't copy the URL from there, because Google will insert an ellipsis in the middle of the long URL. For example, an article I was searching for just now shows up on the green line as ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/masters/mcl/content/.../Robinson-CL2000.pdf. Can't copy that, and can't get the original URL from the right-click either!
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Isn't this occasional problem worth having in return for better search results? How often you copy the link URL instead of checking what's on the other side?
  - huma 15y ago
    It'd be nice to have a [PDF] tag in the link.
  - wazoox 15y ago
    That's why I use the "Google/Yandex Search link Fix" Firefox extension.
- aqrashik 15y ago
  The original link seems to be a search result, which makes me wonder could this be used as some sort of SEO technique. I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings. So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably? Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.
  - pmarin 15y ago
    You are right, It was a search result. I had problems with the link I found in the Wikipedia ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90.7173&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....) but not sure if simply I was filling the wrong entry box in the submit page.
  - kristianp 15y ago
    I imagine google checks that search redirect links actually come from a search result (SR) page, for example by checking the referer. Should this post be flagged because it is a duplicate bypassing the dup detection by using a google SR link? Perhaps.
_delirium 15y ago
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875
pjmlp 15y ago
Quite a nice system. I even wrote a lexer/parser for it back on my university days. It is the living proof that it is possible to use a safe systems programming language for operating system development. The Native Oberon system was quite nice to use in how the UI concepts would map to Oberon modules, as such it was quite extensible. Sadly, it never got picked up by the industry. The way methods are associated with types in Go has been influenced by Oberon language family (see Component Pascal).
zvrba 15y ago
Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.) But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  Try Ada? It's a Pascal family language, with support in GCC and a lot of rather nifty features.
  - adestefan 15y ago
    The gcc Ada support is actively developed and maintained by AdaCore. You can even get paid support if that's your thing.
  - markwong 15y ago
    i love Ada and i think it is the real jewel.
- pjmlp 15y ago
  Me too. If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.
- sehugg 15y ago
  Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp (I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )
pmr_ 15y ago
Oberon was the language used in my high-school courses (This was only 7 years ago). I had a hard time understanding the choice at the time and no one was able to explain it to me, but now it seems it was the logical decision when you try to move away from Pascal as a learning language. The resources at the time available on the web certainly didn't reinforce my confidence in the choice and so I went to the C derivatives and never looked back. If there would have been better resources and better 'publicity' my choice might have been different.
Tloewald 15y ago
I remember playing around with Several different versions of Oberon on my Mac back in the day. It was intriguing but not really useful except for working on Oberon (fine for a comp sci course). The one lasting impact it had on me was that its system font was a really nice sans serif face called Syntax, which I continue to use for many purposes today.
X4 15y ago
For those who waited for "the language" by Nikolaus Wirth those may have a look into Zonnon http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y041123.pdf http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y... [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075] I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms), instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.
rbanffy 15y ago
I'd love to have an FPGA-based Lilith to go along my also wanted Alto and Symbolics machines.
colomon 15y ago
Did anyone else find the story about switching from a tree structure to a list kind of weird? On the one hand, that's a pretty trivial sort of optimization, and hardly seems worth making a fuss about. But on the other hand, isn't he assuming that any future users of his compiler will have source code that looks like his? Sounds like all it would take is one person using an automatic code generator to generate Oberon code that's not smart about reusing variable names to bring the compiler to its knees...
alexeiz 15y ago
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/ http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/ - "Franz received a Dr. sc. techn. degree in Computer Science (advisor: Niklaus Wirth) and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH degree, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich." So Michael Franz can hardly be considered impartial to this matter.

54 points by pmarin 15y ago

aw3c2 15y ago

Warning, direct link to PDF. And for some reason it is linked through Google. Direct link is http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf

pmarin 15y ago
Thanks. It is strange, the only think I did was to use "Copy link as..." in the contextual menu.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Yeah, Google has started adding redirect cruft to search results in the past year or so, which is pretty annoying when trying to share links.
  - hollerith 15y ago
    Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, Google search results have been that way a lot longer than a year.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      You're right, looks like it's been at least since 2009. I recall they used to not have any redirects, and then they started inserting them randomly, for only maybe 5% of search results. Then at some point they got phased in for all results. Thought that phase-in was more recent, but seems not.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Not really cruft, but a very simple way to measure how relevant was that result for the search you did.
    - gruseom 15y ago
      Simple and valuable to Google, perhaps, but a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. It breaks the web in at least two ways: makes it slower and hides the true links. I hate that they do this. Nothing has been more destructive of the warm feeling I used to have toward Google. I still use them out of habit but eventually irritation and the rise of some credible competitor will coincide and cause me to switch.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        > a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. How exactly improving the relevance of the returned results is not the best for their users? > makes it slower 257 ms here. Not that much compared to the 2 seconds the actual server took to start returning the data. > hides the true links The proper URL is the green line under the title. Here it says "www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf".
        _delirium 15y ago
        > The proper URL is the green line under the title. If the URL is short enough that works fine, but if it's longer you can't copy the URL from there, because Google will insert an ellipsis in the middle of the long URL. For example, an article I was searching for just now shows up on the green line as ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/masters/mcl/content/.../Robinson-CL2000.pdf. Can't copy that, and can't get the original URL from the right-click either!
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Isn't this occasional problem worth having in return for better search results? How often you copy the link URL instead of checking what's on the other side?
- huma 15y ago
  It'd be nice to have a [PDF] tag in the link.
- wazoox 15y ago
  That's why I use the "Google/Yandex Search link Fix" Firefox extension.
aqrashik 15y ago
The original link seems to be a search result, which makes me wonder could this be used as some sort of SEO technique. I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings. So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably? Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.
- pmarin 15y ago
  You are right, It was a search result. I had problems with the link I found in the Wikipedia ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90.7173&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....) but not sure if simply I was filling the wrong entry box in the submit page.
- kristianp 15y ago
  I imagine google checks that search redirect links actually come from a search result (SR) page, for example by checking the referer. Should this post be flagged because it is a duplicate bypassing the dup detection by using a google SR link? Perhaps.

_delirium 15y ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409875

pjmlp 15y ago

Quite a nice system. I even wrote a lexer/parser for it back on my university days. It is the living proof that it is possible to use a safe systems programming language for operating system development. The Native Oberon system was quite nice to use in how the UI concepts would map to Oberon modules, as such it was quite extensible. Sadly, it never got picked up by the industry. The way methods are associated with types in Go has been influenced by Oberon language family (see Component Pascal).

zvrba 15y ago

Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.) But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.

JulianMorrison 15y ago
Try Ada? It's a Pascal family language, with support in GCC and a lot of rather nifty features.
- adestefan 15y ago
  The gcc Ada support is actively developed and maintained by AdaCore. You can even get paid support if that's your thing.
- markwong 15y ago
  i love Ada and i think it is the real jewel.
pjmlp 15y ago
Me too. If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.
sehugg 15y ago
Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp (I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )

pmr_ 15y ago

Oberon was the language used in my high-school courses (This was only 7 years ago). I had a hard time understanding the choice at the time and no one was able to explain it to me, but now it seems it was the logical decision when you try to move away from Pascal as a learning language. The resources at the time available on the web certainly didn't reinforce my confidence in the choice and so I went to the C derivatives and never looked back. If there would have been better resources and better 'publicity' my choice might have been different.

Tloewald 15y ago

I remember playing around with Several different versions of Oberon on my Mac back in the day. It was intriguing but not really useful except for working on Oberon (fine for a comp sci course). The one lasting impact it had on me was that its system font was a really nice sans serif face called Syntax, which I continue to use for many purposes today.

X4 15y ago

For those who waited for "the language" by Nikolaus Wirth those may have a look into Zonnon http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y041123.pdf http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y... [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075] I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms), instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.

rbanffy 15y ago

I'd love to have an FPGA-based Lilith to go along my also wanted Alto and Symbolics machines.

colomon 15y ago

Did anyone else find the story about switching from a tree structure to a list kind of weird? On the one hand, that's a pretty trivial sort of optimization, and hardly seems worth making a fuss about. But on the other hand, isn't he assuming that any future users of his compiler will have source code that looks like his? Sounds like all it would take is one person using an automatic code generator to generate Oberon code that's not smart about reusing variable names to bring the compiler to its knees...

alexeiz 15y ago

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/ http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/ - "Franz received a Dr. sc. techn. degree in Computer Science (advisor: Niklaus Wirth) and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH degree, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich." So Michael Franz can hardly be considered impartial to this matter.