[skoodge]

The linked pdfs on that page are wonderful. I reread Wirth's Plea for Lean Software and it still holds up remarkably well. It reminded me of Alan Kay's VPRI and the STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming which unfortunately ended in 2012. Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell. Are there any similar projects that are still being actively worked on?

[Rochus]

> Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell

See https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, and derived languages such as https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron, which inherit the "spirit of Oberon", but specialize for other use-cases than the original.

[vrotaru]

> Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore

That's pretty much it, for maybe 10+ years now. There was a successor project BlueBottle with some promise, but it did not deliver. Later it was renamed to A2. Surprisingly, it did not help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system)

IMO the authors of BB/A2 bet heavily on XML/Java hype, and were trying to make Oberon more like Java. The result was something without much internal consistency and not very usable.

Not being able to use a major browser and not having the resources to write one from scratch did not help either.

Then some of the major figures of this project left. And that was it.

There are some hobbyists and some small businesses which use it for niche projects and that is all

[m_mueller]

was there ever a post mortem on STEPS? I'd like to know what happened as the demoes and ideas they had looked awesome.

[drob518]

The paper archive is still up. There were various interim reports generated for STEPS. I assume there was a final report as well, but I don’t remember reading it, myself. Vpri.org still works.

[mpweiher]

Final report is here:

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf