[loneboat]

Pasting a Wikipedia link or saying "just ask an LLM" only helps out the one instance of someone not knowing. I did the same thing as the OP you're replying to. They're right - a brief summary in the readme would be a near zero-effort permanent fix to people who stumble on your project and dont know what Oberon is.

[Rochus]

Thinking independently and learning strategies to find their own way are among the most important foundations for anyone interested in technology or who wants to work in the field. If people are curious enough about a keyword or topic, they should also be willing to put in some effort to research it. Or, if that really isn’t possible, they should ask good questions. That’s generally much more promising than confronting the author of a post with accusations right off the bat.

[benj111]

So to explain what an apple pie is, first you must explain the universe? Every time?

[luismedel]

Honest question. Where does one stop clarifying things?

[wk_end]

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation.

Of course it's normal for there to be a disconnect between your assumptions about your target audience and reality. In a real conversation this happens all the time and it's no big deal. When something's written and especially when it's printed it can be a bit more of a problem, so maybe better to err on the side of over-explaining. Also a good reason to have editors and proofreaders. But I'm rambling a bit.

In this case, the link was posted to HN by the author, so the author might have had "average HN reader" in mind. Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich I personally wouldn't expect someone - even someone in tech - to know about it.

[luismedel]

Exactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever.

What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "you should put a link about what this thing is" are needless.

[wk_end]

> I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth.

Yes, I think that's a mistake. Lisp and Forth saw widespread commercial use, were hugely influential, and directly begat many other languages. While I'd expect most folks on here to be familiar with Pascal - you could say those same things about it - and maybe even know who Wirth is, Oberon basically saw no commercial use whatsoever and even in academia was basically only used at the school it came from. There's no real comparison.

[fhars]

Yes, you are likely confusing Oberon with Pascal. That is the Wirth language people usually have heard about. They may also have heard about Modula 2, but assuming that is stretching it. I was already interested in computers at the time, but I still only remember Oberon as that even bigger failure than Modula.

[swiftcoder]

The problem with this is that there are so many branches of tech from 40 years ago that any one person is unlikely to be familiar with all of them.

I'm plenty familiar with the whole Modula 3 -> NextSTEP branch of this little tree, but the Oberon branch isn't something I've run into before.

[nothinkjustai]

Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.

[homarp]

it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise

see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/

[Rochus]

It’s also worth noting that Jan (who strictly uses the pronouns var / val) belongs to one of the most historically marginalized groups in modern tech: One-Pass Compiler Enthusiasts. They were repeatedly ostracized by the bloated LLVM cabal for stating that any build process taking longer than 50 milliseconds is a toxic social construct. The ETH fork was actually meant to fund a decentralized safe space where nobody is ever forced to use a borrow checker.

[wk_end]

I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW:

ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans.

But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible.

Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

[cxr]

> even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person

The first sentence of the README says, "This project modernizes the Kernel of Oberon System 3 (version 2.3.7) by migrating it from the original Oberon Boot Loader (OBL, written in assembler) to the Multiboot specification (handled in Oberon directly in the Kernel)."

Armed with that and the headline "Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3", it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system (shown here of being capable of running on a Raspberry Pi). It doesn't require prior familiarity with Oberon, despite what the previous commenter said.

Neither you nor the original questioner are being particularly rational about this.

[swiftcoder]

> it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system

"Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident, but it's also not particularly illuminating. There are dozens of niche operating systems, why do we care about this one in particular? What does it do that other operating systems don't?

[nothinkjustai]

I like how you assumed I’m American because I don’t have knowledge of international top ranking technical schools.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Not everybody lives in Europe or has knowledge of what the top technical schools are (which is a bit classist to assume tbh), and this type of Euro-centric thinking doesn’t work very well when communicating with people from other backgrounds.