The article feels incomplete, as are many articles that praise systems of the past.
Why did Oberon become obsolete? I suspect we could learn a lot from an answer to this question.
Why did Oberon become obsolete? I suspect we could learn a lot from an answer to this question.
These have a history of failing. Not because they are poor at some aspects of being an operating system. But because they force a programmer to give up all their tools. You can't typically use your favorite source control or text editor. (This is getting better as VM interoperability improves.)
So Oberon shares the same fate as other full-stack languages like Smalltalk and Forth. (I'm sure you can think of a few.) Awesome at what they do, but never gains traction.
However both of these are wildly popular. They slot into existing systems, making them easy to pick up and use.
I don't think there is a technical problem with images (which I think is what you're hoping to pounce on and debate ad nauseum), they just demand the rest of the ecosystem be built around them. This seems to be a trick you can get away with once per computing industry. Lots of people have come up with better image structures/concepts than hierarchical blobs of binary data, but they never seem to get significant traction because they are closed.
I'm just trying to untangle the different things you might be talking about - whether you're talking about development tools or run-time monitoring tools?
Oberon the system was an environment; Oberon the language was a language.
The problem is that the C environment is so dominant that we don't usually think of C in the same terms, or remember that systems languages like Oberon are intended to be used for writing OS-like and filesystem-like elements.
Come to think of it, even a "systems" language like Go is still used primarly for writing applications.
How useful is Oberon (the language) for working with filesystem-likes outside of Oberon (the system)?
And that niche is already occupied by the one true programming language.
> working with filesystem-likes
If you mean developing applications, there was „BlackBox Component Builder“
And all systems langauges will be used heavily for writing applications because there is typically a huge benefit of developing in the same language as the underlying OS.
2nd paragraph -- "In his modest Swiss Engineer’s manner, and quite untypical for a celebrated academic, Wirth consistently avoided exploiting the initially high-speeding Pascal bandwagon for the purpose of “marketing” his subsequent ideas. Indeed, he even refrained from giving his later programming-language creations names such as “Pascal-2”, “Pascal Plus”, or “Pascal-2000” but instead opted first for “Modula”, and then “Oberon”. Both of these languages would probably have been considerably more successful if the connection to the Pascal legacy had been made in their name, but this would have run counter to Wirth’s view that a marketer he is not."
Also see "Pascal and its Successors" http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php
Plus when my buddies and I were interested in it, there was no hardware in the States to run it on. It did get one of our number into the PC532 scene and I came up a semi-interesting idea to turn graphics chips into encryption engines based on the NS32GX32 instruction set.