[Keyframe]

Oberon. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Once upon a time there was a great crossroad in the early 90's (when I was a kid and learning programming - keep in mind that perspective).

BASIC was on its way out - we all knew it to some extent due to home computers renaissance, but it was evident it didn't have any staying power. So there were all these wonderful machines with different architectures, OS' and programming languages out there, with no clear winner (it depended on what you wanted to do). So, basically there were two camps in the end, regarding programming languages. Pascal and C. Pascal had that notion that it was, too, on its way out, but was really useful and Oberon was around the corner so it was worth the wait to stick with it. On the other hand C++ was entering the arena full force, because machines were getting faster (it had a stigma of being slow). I went with C, because I was getting into SGI/IRIX and CG (and later on abandoned programming as a full time choice), and some of my friends went with Pascal. Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me. Eventually, Pascal guys moved to Delphi and my circle of C guys either stayed with C (like I did) or bought OO Kool-Aid and went with C++ (of which some later on went to Java). Pascal (later on Delphi) guys developed sort of a cult. It never was clear what happened to Oberon, and (to me) to this day it's a mystery. Funny enough, I can now retrospectively see that programming languages we chose (and stuck with) was heavily influenced by machines/OS' we used. Pascal guys were mostly PC or Atari guys, and C were mostly those with access to *NIX and Amigas.

[pjmlp]

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me.

Wirth was never good on capitalizing his work on the industry. Same thing happened to Modula-2 sadly.

On his ACM award article and a later article about lean software, he discusses how sadly he sees industry embracing complexity instead of quality.

http://www-oldurls.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Turin...

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware....

> Pascal guys were mostly PC or Atari guys, and C were mostly those with access to *NIX and Amigas.

A reason why I never cared about C, so basic when compared with Turbo Pascal 6.0, and eventually got to move into C++.

Also most of my friends with Amigas cared only about Assembly.

[Keyframe]

Also most of my friends with Amigas cared only about Assembly.

Of course. I tried to be as brief as possible, not to bother people. Even C had a stigma of being slow back then. Assembly was the language for anything performant, but everybody was aware that in the following years computers will get fast enough (computers, not compilers hah) not to care.

[pjmlp]

Sure, sorry for misunderstanding you.

That is why I always smile when people talk about how modern languages are so slow and C is the king of speed, if only they used those old C compilers back then...

[vidarh]

> Also most of my friends with Amigas cared only about Assembly.

The irony in that is that the Amiga had a lot of decent implementations of Wirths languages. Both Pascal (including the moderately comercially successful HiSoft Pascal), Modula-II and Oberon.

[pjmlp]

Those friend of mine were into demoscene, hence the Assembly.

HiSoft tools were great.

[justin66]

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me.

Oberon was an operating system as well as a language, and Oberon was an operating system without processes. Game over.

I mean, there are other cons, like the UI. But in a world where Unix was a done deal, NT and Plan 9 were being spun up, BSD was breaking free and users were happy enough with their Unix, MacOS and Windows machines, Oberon took simplicity too far in a number of ways. (Pascal and Modula-2 were a better bet)

In a weird coincidence I saw that someone is selling an Oberon system today and advertising its single-process nature as a feature. Some kind of networked realtime finance application or something, pretty niche, and who knows if they'll make any money with it.

[thesz]

Look at Singularity project from Microsoft.

It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.

[ectoplasm]

Singularity has tons of processes called SIPs and they communicate with each other.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/