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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised the top comment on an HN post is someone asking what Oberon is (especially someone who have programmer in their name.) Oberon is not only a programming language, but an entire software and hardware computing system built from the ground up to be as minimal as possible by famed computer scientist Niklaus Wirth. Simple RISC CPU, Oberon compiler, OS And Windowing system. The windowing system was famously copied by Rob Pike's Acme text editor on Plan 9.

https://projectoberon.net/

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I'm quite familiar with Project Oberon as a professor who studies operating systems and programming languages, but even though this is Hacker News where many of us are familiar with the project, I'm not surprised that there are also many readers who are not familiar with it, since Oberon does not have the userbase of much more popular programming languages and operating systems, and it's not even covered in many undergraduate courses on those topics. Most undergraduate OS courses are Unix-focused, centering on either Linux, Minix, or xv6. The Oberon OS is certainly not Unix. Programming languages and compiler courses tend to vary, but I haven't seen one that uses Oberon.

I got to learn about Oberon in the 1990's, because FCT/UNL degree was quite strong in languages and systems programming, and we had exposure to all kinds of programming languages, I even studied ALGOL type system, with its wonderful "call by name" that you see almost nowhere nowadays, other than as lazy lambdas kind of approach.

I am not a CS student nor have I had a "programming job." I just enjoy computing which leads me to explore the different design philosophies so I read and tinker. Currently I am learning Ada, itself based on Wirth's Pascal so I am on a bit of a Wirthian kick.

I mean, in all fairness, I wasn't even born when Oberon started development

It's not just you. I started coding in the 80s. Never heard of Oberon.

Remember that people who familiarize themselves with computing history are neither "crushing it" nor doing anything else evocative of advertising for energy drinks. Study of computing history is therefore something to be avoided.

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