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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what extent an unikernel is an OS.

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.

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> Go has all the same features as Oberon has

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.

You get similar workflows via interfaces, delegation and now generics to help reduce the boilerplate.

COM has done just great during the last 30 years without class inheritance.

I didn't say that the "Go way" was bad; just that there are few similarities. Certain things you can do in Oberon you cannot do in Go and vice versa. Personally I prefer Oberon+ over both Go and previous Oberons; if I didn't need to maintain backward compatibility with Oberon/-2/-07 I would remove type inclusion from Oberon+ and require explicit casts like Go; Wirth also removed type inclusion from Oberon-07, but he (unfortunately) also removed all numeric types but INTEGER, REAL and BYTE (but left some unfortunate implicit casts).

From that point of view yes, I do agree.

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.

> In any case, Oberon's best days are behind it

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.

The whole point of Oberon was the Smalltalk like experience, or to be more precise Mesa/Cedar like experience.

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.

> The whole point of Oberon was the Smalltalk ... Mesa/Cedar like experience.

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".

It is definitly true for Oberon OS System 3.

Oberon-07 isn't it.

References?

References to what?

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?

References for your claim that "The whole point of Oberon was the Smalltalk ... Mesa/Cedar like experience." and "It is definitly true for Oberon OS System 3." I was at ETH until 1993 (and then again from 2000 to 2005 for my PhD) and have other information directly from the sources.

So now I have to find a magic paragraph, which as it seems won't change your mind anyway, because "I was there Luke", why bother life is too short.

No magic, just facts, Luke; don't search too long; look at the introductory sections of "Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" (ACM 1992), "The Oberon Companion, A Guide to Using and Programming Oberon System 3" (vdf 1998), and Gutknecht, J (1994): Oberon System 3: Vision of a Future Software Technology, Springer, Software.

Thanks for proving me right it would be a waste of time.

See, this could have been a healthy discussion about Oberon, instead it went sour.

Learning is never a waste of time.

I don't think I have the breadth of your knowledge, so I would really love any thoughts you had on the language/OS I'm creating, github.com/civboot/fngi.

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.

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