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Comment by eukgoekoko | Hacker News Reader

The article praises some features adherent to the runtime/standard library: file system, Hypertext-Based User Interface, but what does it have to do with the language itself? What about clunky COBOLique keyword set: PROCEDURE, BEGIN/END? What about FOR loops, not implemented in the original Oberon? Ironically, LISP dialects predating PASCAL-family are still alive, whereas Pascal/Modula/Oberon are dead as a dodo.

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Many people like the clunky syntax of Wirth's languages, and have been exceedingly productive in those languages.

There's Borland's ObjectPascal products, of course (from Turbo to Delphi), which were extremely successful for many years and still survive today. Pascal is nowhere as popular today as in its heyday, but there are people still using Delphi as well as Lazarus, a modern open-source Pascal implementation that's compatible with Delphi.

One of the most popular languages right now, Go, is heavily influenced by Modula and Oberon. Go is more complex, and opts for a more C-like syntax, but many of its concepts come directly from those languages. Another nascent language with a heavy ObjectPascal influence is Nim (which was created by a former ObjectPascaler).

Ada is another Pascal dialect that is far from dead.

Granted, I personally wouldn't want to use these languages today. Go and Nim are taking the programming language evolution further. But this article isn't about using Oberon today.

Not only ADA itself is far from dead. PL/SQL is a descendent of Ada and a niche language used in the Oracle RDBMS, but it has a TIOBE index of 18.

Don't forget that Apple was a heavy Pascal user in the 80s. Wirth designed Clascal (used with the Apple Lisa computer) for them, which then got morphed into Object Pascal for the Mac. Many applications were written in Object Pascal. Apple developed Lisa Toolkit (an application framework) for Clascal. This was then morphed into MacApp for Object Pascal.

Interesting, I remember reading (maybe just the name) Clascal back in the day, did not know that it morphed into Object Pascal or that Wirth worked on it.

Ada is a Pascal dialect? How do you figure? (If you mean "somewhat in the Pascal flavor", I might be able to see it...)

A more C-like syntax, with a more Pascal-like semantics, might actually be a reasonable sweet spot. (I think the C syntax won for a reason. It's terser, without being so terse it's unreadable, and therefore gives you higher bandwidth. Most peoples' complaints about C are the semantics, not the syntax - though I'm sure at least some people dislike that too...)

While Ada is not formally a Pascal dialect, it arguably has more influence from Pascal than from the earlier ALGOL (which also influenced Pascal; it has keywords like PROCEDURE, BEGIN and END) and Simula. A Pascal-family developer can more easily pick up Ada than, say, a C programmer; the Pascal family already has TYPE, VAR, ranges, records, etc.

From the 1983 Ada reference manual [1]:

    Another significant simplification of the design work
    resulted from earlier experience acquired by several
    successful Pascal derivatives developed with similar
    goals. These are the languages Euclid, Lis, Mesa,
    Modula, and Sue. Many of the key ideas and syntactic
    forms developed in these languages have counterparts
    in Ada. Several existing languages such as Algol 68
    and Simula, and also recent research languages such
    as Alphard and Clu, influenced this language in
    several respects, although to a lesser degree than
    did the Pascal family.

Ada was widely considered as being an evolution of Pascal at the time (e.g. [2]).

[1] http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-01-03.html

[2] https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-pdf/25/2/248/1080494...

It's Wirthian with sane precedence for the and/or operators.

Neither the article, nor your comment provide any substantial arguments, why the language itself should be perceived as a "jewel". All you have is just some references to inspiring success stories and an appeal to authority. What is cool about Oberon, really? (Apart your Wirth-fandom)

> why... "jewel"

Worth having a look at.

>> why... "jewel" >Worth having a look at.

Nice one, actually :) The main thing people do with jewels is look at them (apart from keeping them as a store of value).

This is addressed in the abstract of the paper:

> But ever since Pascal, the language aspect has been almost secondary to Wirth's work. Modula(-2) and Oberon both came out of larger system-level design projects that simultaneously also developed workstation computers, modular operating systems, and suites of innovative application programs. Unfortunately, these other important contributions were overshadowed by the programming languages they were associated with, and hence never received the recognition they deserved.

Oberon was both a programming language and an operating system implemented in that programming language. Much like LISP machines, the boundary between programming language and operating system is fuzzy.

Procedure, Begin/End don't come from Cobol. They come from Algol. Wirth worked on Algol-W which is a predecessor language of Pascal.

Cobol postdates Algol so it doesn't make sense to see it as the source of the keyword-based syntax of the Algol and Algol derived languages.

False.

Pascal is very much alive:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Above Ruby, GO, Perl, Visual Basic, Swift and more.

It is amazing how popular scratch is!

The Oberon language was instrumental for the creation of the Oberon operating system. Writh makes this clear in several articles. For example http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf in the "History and motivation" chapter or in the paper "A plea for lean software" [http://neacsu.net/prog/A%20Plea%20for%20Lean%20Software.pdf]

Astrobe, doing Oberon related business for ARM Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7 microcontrollers and Xilinx FPGA Systems since 1997.

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

MikroElektronika, selling Pascal and Basic compilers for all sort of microcontrollers and embedded platforms also since 1997.

Embarcadero is still selling Delphi.

The keywords are not much more clunky than SQL ones, and no one is required to write them as such, unless they enjoy using editors without auto-formatting capabilities.

https://www.mikroe.com/

Lisp survives in part because of Emacs and MIT. Oberon never had an equivalent application.

True. Lisp has never had strong lobby among corporations (like Pascal had) and is still striving to survive. Some 30-40 years after it has been created people start to dig in the whole paradigm: "program as mathematical expression" as opposed to "program as a natural language sentence" ALGOL/COBOL/PASCAL/etc.

You keep making the COBOL to PASCAL connection, but to me that implies that you don't understand their design goals. The entire ALGOL-W, Pascal, Modula(-II), Oberon, Oberon-07 chain of Wirth languages was decades of striving for a minimalism in design that is entirely different from languages like COBOL and certainly have nothing to do with "program as a natural language sentence". The Wirth languages doesn't shy away from using English keywords, but when you look at their grammar, what stands out is how they focus on simplicity, not approaching natural language.

Wirth-ian languages is about languages as engineering. They're precise and pragmatic - e.g. constructs were stripped out if Wirth did not feel he could translate them into assembly in a compact and simple and easily understandable manner; he put restrictions on adding improvements to the compiler that didn't "pay for themselves" etc. The entire toolchains and systems and languages he worked on is focused on this.

>whereas Pascal/Modula/Oberon are dead as a dodo.

Dead as a dodo? You need to check your facts. For instance, the FreePascal mailing list is very much alive and well. People are using it to make and ship real projects and products. Not as many, maybe, in volume, compared to the most widely used languages such as Java, C#, C, JavaScript, etc., but definitely not a trivial number (anecdotal, based on what I've read, and seen on the mailing list).

Heck, even Delphi, which is a descendant of Pascal, is still going somewhat strong, with many users, despite wrong turns taken by Borland and others who owned it at different times. And there is also Lazarus, a sort of free clone of Delphi, based on Free Pascal with GUI support, IDE and libraries added.

As plenty of others have said here in the past, this board (HN) is representative of just a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of business software activity going on in the world. So you can't draw valid conclusions from what you read here, except for this microcosm.

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