Golang is the modern Oberon.
https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...
Go has all the same features as Oberon has, in regards to systems programming, it is a matter of anyone finding it worthwhile to actually design a graphical OS with it.
I will conceed it lacks a very important one from Oberon, proper dynamic loading. Also the plugin packages are mostly abandoned across several releases.
However in this day and age, probably it would make more sense to do the dynamic loading capabilities of Oberon commands available via OS IPC instead.
Go is missing both two new features Wirth introduced in Oberon compared to Modula (see section 5.2 of the referenced HOPL paper): type extension (i.e. inheritance) and type inclusion (no implicit coercion in Golang at all).
Taking a closer look there are only few similarities between Oberon and Go; both are garbage collected; Go uses the same separate receiver syntax element in method declarations as Oberon-2; and there is an intersection of keywords and also := appears, but the semantics are rather different.
COM has done just great during the last 30 years without class inheritance.
Although I still think Active Oberon is the best descendant from original Oberon, I am not a fan of the minimalist design Wirth persued afterwards.
In any case, Oberon's best days are behind it, hence why I would rather see some Go inspired approach to those ideas, even if I am not a big fan of Go's design.
Maybe if you insist that parallel processing is part of the language (which you likely do if you prefer Active Oberon). Personally I think this can be well delegated to libraries to keep the language simple. Oberon+ doesn't use dedicated syntax even for exception handling; also "green" or regular threads, and channels and the like can well be covered by libraries or FFI. I'm neither a fan of Go's design, but with the ongoing work on Oberon+ I'm confident that its best days are yet to come.
So to offer a bare bones language in 2022 without an OS that is at least at the same level of Blue Bottle, let alone what consumers expect from a modern OS is really not attainable.
It remains a nice language to look at as language nerd, and at the end of the day, pick something else when delivering software into production with the expectations that Swift, C#, Kotlin and so on can fulfill.
That's not even true if you mean the Oberon OS.
The idea - as described in the referenced HOPL paper - was the focus on the essentials of a language, which from my point of view is still a very valid goal, as you can see by just looking at the success of Go.
Swift, C#, Kotlin are at the other extreme of the spectrum, not too far away from modern C++ or Ada, where the language designers seem to want to integrate everything that anyone could ever want. That makes about as much sense as everyone today thinking they have to drive an SUV, and leave the bicycles or other economical means of transport as "a nice thing to look at" for the "transportation nerds".
Oberon-07 isn't it.
Worth's quest to reduce Oberon's usability to a language without the libraries and related OS infrastructure that made it interesting to use in first place?
See, this could have been a healthy discussion about Oberon, instead it went sour.
It's partly inspired from Oberon (although I started it without knowing about Oberon), but I'm still working my way through the book and language as I develop my own. I'm sure it's going to a decade+ project to have something valuable, but I'm hungry for any feedback I can get at this early stage.