5 ms·

Ask HN: Oberon et al., vs. Rust

17 points by mikethe 10mo ago

Greetings, I recently came accross this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501352 I am interested, in particular, by the comment by vidarh, that starts with: "You've been given the answer already: Simplicity. You keep ignoring it." I find myself highly interested in what this person would have to say about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents? I have heard that Rust is a big language. By that definition, a simpler one must be better, right? And yet rust is a big thing, and .. oberon is ..dusty? I will keep on searching, and maybe attempt to contact him/her/(other?) directly.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 10mo ago
If you're curious about Wirth languages (Oberon is an example), then Ada is the one to explore. Standardized. Very mature. Proven track record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
- mikethe 10mo ago
  ..thank you.. I am very curious at the moment about why my post shows up a lighter shade of gray than others. I have done some searching, and apparently this can have something to do with people down-voting something, maybe if it seems to contain disparaging comments. I described oberon as "dusty", could that be it? It wasn't meant to be disparaging. You see rust all over the place. If I hadn't been exploring the text editor vis referred to by suckless, I wouldn't have even known oberon existed. I am -not- trying to criticize oberon. I am not trying to claim that rust is better. I am just looking for a comparison of the two, from the point of view of the particular poster I referenced. I would have responded to his comment directly if I could. Thank you very much for your tip about ada. I'll check it out!
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    If you DO want to try out Oberon, here are some starting points: - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - https://free.oberon.org/en/ https://free.oberon.org/en/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333)
    - mikethe 10mo ago
      Thanks!
  - fuzzfactor 10mo ago
    The submission text is always grey. Your comments will not appear grey unless downvoted more so than upvoted, and that grey will be seen by others but not be seen by you while you are still logged in. Your account name is new and so appears in green which some users will scrutinize until they are confident it is not a bad actor.
    - mikethe 10mo ago
      Super helpful! Thank you!
- Jtsummers 10mo ago
  Ada is Wirthian, but not a Wirth language. It's worth making the distinction because while its syntax and many of its semantics can be seen as coming from Algol and Wirth's line of languages in particular, he did not design it himself.
  - Rochus 10mo ago
    Ada is not even "Wirthian". There are similarities with Pascal syntax, but the philosophy is completely different (see my other comment).
- Rochus 10mo ago
  Ada is superficially related with Pascal syntax, but definitely not a Wirth language (whether directly nor in spirit).
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    You're right that Wirth neither designed Ada nor is Ada in the direct Wirth line (Algol -> Pascal -> Modula 2 -> Oberon), but I think of Ada is very much a parallel branch (Algol -> Ada) and Wirth-influenced, but I would defer to your expertise. Maybe the biggest difference between Ada and true Wirth languages is that it is not deliberately minimal. Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically, but industrial-scale?
    - Rochus 10mo ago
      Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax. Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "uneconomical"; he believed that because Ada’s requirements were so "baroque" and contradictory, the resulting language was inevitably overloaded with features whose marginal benefits did not justify their complexity (https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_09_1985-05_CL_Publications_US https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_09_1985-...). But when you e.g. study the Oberon system, you see that it depended on "tricks" (e.g. SYSTEM.PUT/GET, VAR ARRAY of SYSTEM.BYTE) which were not properly integrated in the language concepts and had to be used without any typechecking support by the compiler.
      - andsoitis 10mo ago
        I see. Thanks for your explanation.
        Rochus 10mo ago
        > Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically In the Rationale for the Design of the Ada Programming Language (published as SIGPLAN Notices, June 1979), the design team explicitly lists their influences. Mesa (a language developed at Xerox PARC, where Wirth made his sabbaticals) is cited as a source for the module/package concept. Modula (referring to Modula-1, 1977) is cited in the context of concurrency and low-level hardware access (e.g., handling interrupts, device drivers), and for the general concept of the module as a syntactic unit. From the timeline we can assume that Modula-2 had not arrived at the design team when they released their proposal to the DoD. Notably, Wirth had actually submitted his own proposal to the DoD (the "Yellow" language, via SRI in 1977), though he withdrew it early because he felt the requirements were too complex. Unfortunately, no public specification of the "Yellow" language exists, but it was very likely not Modula-2.
leecommamichael 10mo ago
When I see these subjects, I can't help but talk about the Odin Programming Language. It's been such a joy working nearly exclusively in Odin this year. The creator of Odin might have something interesting to say on this topic. vidarh said "Wirth was perhaps too ascetic in his insistence on keeping the compilers minimal, but you can fine less extreme versions carried on in extensions done in the PhD dissertations of students in his group." I'm not versed in the extensions, but I wouldn't be surprised if Odin looked a lot like them. It's a very practical language, and feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos.
- Rochus 10mo ago
  > feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos. While Odin is a modern and capable language, it belongs to the "C-alternative" school (alongside Zig) rather than the "Wirthian" school (Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon). Odin, by design, retains manual memory management and allows pointer arithmetic. Oberon has a GC and very restricted pointer use. Odin's "joy" and "practicality" come from adding many features that Wirth would have considered "unnecessary complexity".
  - kazinator 10mo ago
    ISO Modula 2 has manual allocation and deallocation: NEW and DISPOSE. The ISO module SYSTEM provides pointer arithmetic with "ADR" manipulation. Argubly, though, ISO Modula 2 is not exactly a Wirthian language any more but "Standardian".
    - AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
      Even Pascal had a way of allocating things on the heap, though I forget the syntax.
  - leecommamichael 10mo ago
    I see what you're saying, and it's true that C's design guides Odin's in a large way. A more precise way to word things may have been "inspired by" rather than "with" Wirth's design ethos. In Odin's case, I do think there's quite a lot of design area reduced in not having a GC, which is no small amount of complexity to skip.
Rochus 10mo ago
> about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents? It's a completely different language with different focus and features. "better" depends on the requirements you want to solve with the language. Rust can do memory management at compile time whereas Oberon and its descendants (such as my Oberon+ version) use a garbage collector at runtime. Rust is much bigger and more complex than Oberon, but it also has features which make it more suitable for systems programming. Simpler is not automatically better. If a language is too "simple" (i.e. minimalist), the complexity often shifts from the language specification to the application code, requiring more boilerplate or "clever" tricks to solve complex problems. And it was not only simplicity (as Vidar assumed), but Oberon indeed had a different approach to OO in that there were no bound procedures, but the idea was (as you can observe e.g. in the Oberon systems and in publication by Wirth an his PhD students) that "type extension" (i.e. inheritance) is used to create extensible message hierarchies, which then are polymorphically handled by procedures accepting a VAR parameter of the most general message type. In this handler, the messages are dispatched by the IS operator or the WITH or CASE statement. This has similar effects as e.g achievable by sum types, and interestingly is closer to e.g. Alan Kay's view of OO than the implementation found in Smalltalk-80 (notably, Wirth arrived at this message-centric model independently of Kay’s work in the Smalltalk lineage).
- mikethe 10mo ago
  "Simpler is not automatically better. If a language is too "simple" (i.e. minimalist), the complexity often shifts from the language specification to the application code, requiring more boilerplate or "clever" tricks to solve complex problems." ..fascinating.. ..it always comes down, again and again, to what is the problem you need to solve, and from there, what is the best solution. And at that point, once you have identified the problem.. in a way it's a toss-up whether you implement your own solution, or just happen to have heard of a solution to a similar or equivalent (or the same) problem, developed by somebody else. ..or how willing you are to dig in search of said hypothetical already-existing solution. And said hypotheticals must then themselves be evaluated, which also takes time.
- mikethe 10mo ago
  OO is a big issue here. Or rather, in general. I have read "The Art of Unix Programming", where a very big fuss is made over object-orientation. It's like they want to take a really big gun that means big business, and shoot it. Ever since reading that, I yelp whenever I see it mentioned, and squint in suspicion at the offender. So when a titan like Wirth endorses it.. ..there is obviously something of great importance that needs to be clearly understood, and that is -not- obvious. The same thing when I see mentions of C++. Except that I haven't yet found endorsements of it from anybody of Wirth's stature. Sites like suckless really do not help. Related: https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/lfaq/index.html#HARDWARE_AND_SOFTWARE https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/lfaq/index.html#HARDWARE_AND_SOF... " Is it object-oriented? No, not in the conventional sense. It is written in a strict dialect of ISO/ANSI C. In a wider sense, its general design of making all its ``objects'' look like files to which one talks in a well-defined protocol shows a related approach. "
01300415352 10mo ago
[flagged]

17 points by mikethe 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

andsoitis 10mo ago

If you're curious about Wirth languages (Oberon is an example), then Ada is the one to explore. Standardized. Very mature. Proven track record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)

mikethe 10mo ago
..thank you.. I am very curious at the moment about why my post shows up a lighter shade of gray than others. I have done some searching, and apparently this can have something to do with people down-voting something, maybe if it seems to contain disparaging comments. I described oberon as "dusty", could that be it? It wasn't meant to be disparaging. You see rust all over the place. If I hadn't been exploring the text editor vis referred to by suckless, I wouldn't have even known oberon existed. I am -not- trying to criticize oberon. I am not trying to claim that rust is better. I am just looking for a comparison of the two, from the point of view of the particular poster I referenced. I would have responded to his comment directly if I could. Thank you very much for your tip about ada. I'll check it out!
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  If you DO want to try out Oberon, here are some starting points: - https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon - https://free.oberon.org/en/ https://free.oberon.org/en/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240333)
  - mikethe 10mo ago
    Thanks!
- fuzzfactor 10mo ago
  The submission text is always grey. Your comments will not appear grey unless downvoted more so than upvoted, and that grey will be seen by others but not be seen by you while you are still logged in. Your account name is new and so appears in green which some users will scrutinize until they are confident it is not a bad actor.
  - mikethe 10mo ago
    Super helpful! Thank you!
Jtsummers 10mo ago
Ada is Wirthian, but not a Wirth language. It's worth making the distinction because while its syntax and many of its semantics can be seen as coming from Algol and Wirth's line of languages in particular, he did not design it himself.
- Rochus 10mo ago
  Ada is not even "Wirthian". There are similarities with Pascal syntax, but the philosophy is completely different (see my other comment).
Rochus 10mo ago
Ada is superficially related with Pascal syntax, but definitely not a Wirth language (whether directly nor in spirit).
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  You're right that Wirth neither designed Ada nor is Ada in the direct Wirth line (Algol -> Pascal -> Modula 2 -> Oberon), but I think of Ada is very much a parallel branch (Algol -> Ada) and Wirth-influenced, but I would defer to your expertise. Maybe the biggest difference between Ada and true Wirth languages is that it is not deliberately minimal. Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically, but industrial-scale?
  - Rochus 10mo ago
    Ada and Wirth’s languages (including Modula-2) represent fundamentally opposing schools of thought regarding language design, despite their shared ALGOL-60 heritage and partly related syntax. Ada is in every aspect a much bigger and more powerful (e.g. concerning the ability of the compiler to assist you in writing safe low-level code) language than any of the Wirth languages. Wirth famously criticized Ada as being "uneconomical"; he believed that because Ada’s requirements were so "baroque" and contradictory, the resulting language was inevitably overloaded with features whose marginal benefits did not justify their complexity (https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_09_1985-05_CL_Publications_US https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_09_1985-...). But when you e.g. study the Oberon system, you see that it depended on "tricks" (e.g. SYSTEM.PUT/GET, VAR ARRAY of SYSTEM.BYTE) which were not properly integrated in the language concepts and had to be used without any typechecking support by the compiler.
    - andsoitis 10mo ago
      I see. Thanks for your explanation.
      - Rochus 10mo ago
        > Would you say that Ada sits close to Modula 2 philosophically In the Rationale for the Design of the Ada Programming Language (published as SIGPLAN Notices, June 1979), the design team explicitly lists their influences. Mesa (a language developed at Xerox PARC, where Wirth made his sabbaticals) is cited as a source for the module/package concept. Modula (referring to Modula-1, 1977) is cited in the context of concurrency and low-level hardware access (e.g., handling interrupts, device drivers), and for the general concept of the module as a syntactic unit. From the timeline we can assume that Modula-2 had not arrived at the design team when they released their proposal to the DoD. Notably, Wirth had actually submitted his own proposal to the DoD (the "Yellow" language, via SRI in 1977), though he withdrew it early because he felt the requirements were too complex. Unfortunately, no public specification of the "Yellow" language exists, but it was very likely not Modula-2.

leecommamichael 10mo ago

When I see these subjects, I can't help but talk about the Odin Programming Language. It's been such a joy working nearly exclusively in Odin this year. The creator of Odin might have something interesting to say on this topic. vidarh said "Wirth was perhaps too ascetic in his insistence on keeping the compilers minimal, but you can fine less extreme versions carried on in extensions done in the PhD dissertations of students in his group." I'm not versed in the extensions, but I wouldn't be surprised if Odin looked a lot like them. It's a very practical language, and feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos.

Rochus 10mo ago
> feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos. While Odin is a modern and capable language, it belongs to the "C-alternative" school (alongside Zig) rather than the "Wirthian" school (Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon). Odin, by design, retains manual memory management and allows pointer arithmetic. Oberon has a GC and very restricted pointer use. Odin's "joy" and "practicality" come from adding many features that Wirth would have considered "unnecessary complexity".
- kazinator 10mo ago
  ISO Modula 2 has manual allocation and deallocation: NEW and DISPOSE. The ISO module SYSTEM provides pointer arithmetic with "ADR" manipulation. Argubly, though, ISO Modula 2 is not exactly a Wirthian language any more but "Standardian".
  - AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
    Even Pascal had a way of allocating things on the heap, though I forget the syntax.
- leecommamichael 10mo ago
  I see what you're saying, and it's true that C's design guides Odin's in a large way. A more precise way to word things may have been "inspired by" rather than "with" Wirth's design ethos. In Odin's case, I do think there's quite a lot of design area reduced in not having a GC, which is no small amount of complexity to skip.

Rochus 10mo ago

> about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents? It's a completely different language with different focus and features. "better" depends on the requirements you want to solve with the language. Rust can do memory management at compile time whereas Oberon and its descendants (such as my Oberon+ version) use a garbage collector at runtime. Rust is much bigger and more complex than Oberon, but it also has features which make it more suitable for systems programming. Simpler is not automatically better. If a language is too "simple" (i.e. minimalist), the complexity often shifts from the language specification to the application code, requiring more boilerplate or "clever" tricks to solve complex problems. And it was not only simplicity (as Vidar assumed), but Oberon indeed had a different approach to OO in that there were no bound procedures, but the idea was (as you can observe e.g. in the Oberon systems and in publication by Wirth an his PhD students) that "type extension" (i.e. inheritance) is used to create extensible message hierarchies, which then are polymorphically handled by procedures accepting a VAR parameter of the most general message type. In this handler, the messages are dispatched by the IS operator or the WITH or CASE statement. This has similar effects as e.g achievable by sum types, and interestingly is closer to e.g. Alan Kay's view of OO than the implementation found in Smalltalk-80 (notably, Wirth arrived at this message-centric model independently of Kay’s work in the Smalltalk lineage).

mikethe 10mo ago
"Simpler is not automatically better. If a language is too "simple" (i.e. minimalist), the complexity often shifts from the language specification to the application code, requiring more boilerplate or "clever" tricks to solve complex problems." ..fascinating.. ..it always comes down, again and again, to what is the problem you need to solve, and from there, what is the best solution. And at that point, once you have identified the problem.. in a way it's a toss-up whether you implement your own solution, or just happen to have heard of a solution to a similar or equivalent (or the same) problem, developed by somebody else. ..or how willing you are to dig in search of said hypothetical already-existing solution. And said hypotheticals must then themselves be evaluated, which also takes time.
mikethe 10mo ago
OO is a big issue here. Or rather, in general. I have read "The Art of Unix Programming", where a very big fuss is made over object-orientation. It's like they want to take a really big gun that means big business, and shoot it. Ever since reading that, I yelp whenever I see it mentioned, and squint in suspicion at the offender. So when a titan like Wirth endorses it.. ..there is obviously something of great importance that needs to be clearly understood, and that is -not- obvious. The same thing when I see mentions of C++. Except that I haven't yet found endorsements of it from anybody of Wirth's stature. Sites like suckless really do not help. Related: https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/lfaq/index.html#HARDWARE_AND_SOFTWARE https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/lfaq/index.html#HARDWARE_AND_SOF... " Is it object-oriented? No, not in the conventional sense. It is written in a strict dialect of ISO/ANSI C. In a wider sense, its general design of making all its ``objects'' look like files to which one talks in a well-defined protocol shows a related approach. "

01300415352 10mo ago

[flagged]