4 ms·

I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW: ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the wo

by wk_end 6mo ago

I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW: ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans. But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible. Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

nothinkjustai 6mo ago
I like how you assumed I’m American because I don’t have knowledge of international top ranking technical schools. One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Not everybody lives in Europe or has knowledge of what the top technical schools are (which is a bit classist to assume tbh), and this type of Euro-centric thinking doesn’t work very well when communicating with people from other backgrounds.
cxr 6mo ago
> even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person The first sentence of the README says, "This project modernizes the Kernel of Oberon System 3 (version 2.3.7) by migrating it from the original Oberon Boot Loader (OBL, written in assembler) to the Multiboot specification (handled in Oberon directly in the Kernel)." Armed with that and the headline "Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3", it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system (shown here of being capable of running on a Raspberry Pi). It doesn't require prior familiarity with Oberon, despite what the previous commenter said. Neither you nor the original questioner are being particularly rational about this.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  > it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, but it's also not particularly illuminating. There are dozens of niche operating systems, why do we care about this one in particular? What does it do that other operating systems don't?
  - lproven 6mo ago
    > "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, No, it is not evident: this is not correct. Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS. > why do we care about this one in particular? 1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success. (A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.) 2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal. The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC. Development did not end there. Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon. 3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world. > What does it do that other operating systems don't? Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity. https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code. 4k LOC. The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix. It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon. https://blackboxframework.org/ https://blackboxframework.org/ It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.

by wk_end 6mo ago

nothinkjustai 6mo ago

I like how you assumed I’m American because I don’t have knowledge of international top ranking technical schools. One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Not everybody lives in Europe or has knowledge of what the top technical schools are (which is a bit classist to assume tbh), and this type of Euro-centric thinking doesn’t work very well when communicating with people from other backgrounds.

cxr 6mo ago

> even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person The first sentence of the README says, "This project modernizes the Kernel of Oberon System 3 (version 2.3.7) by migrating it from the original Oberon Boot Loader (OBL, written in assembler) to the Multiboot specification (handled in Oberon directly in the Kernel)." Armed with that and the headline "Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3", it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system (shown here of being capable of running on a Raspberry Pi). It doesn't require prior familiarity with Oberon, despite what the previous commenter said. Neither you nor the original questioner are being particularly rational about this.

swiftcoder 6mo ago
> it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, but it's also not particularly illuminating. There are dozens of niche operating systems, why do we care about this one in particular? What does it do that other operating systems don't?
- lproven 6mo ago
  > "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, No, it is not evident: this is not correct. Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS. > why do we care about this one in particular? 1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success. (A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.) 2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal. The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC. Development did not end there. Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon. 3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world. > What does it do that other operating systems don't? Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity. https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code. 4k LOC. The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix. It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon. https://blackboxframework.org/ https://blackboxframework.org/ It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.