I had the oportunity to watch a presentation from Nikolaus Wirth, back in 2003, when I was at CERN.
One of the reasons that prevented Oberon to get better audience was the tunnel vision of its ETHZ creators. I remember that they were talking about it as it is the best language in the world, and everyone else is a sad fool not to understand it, but will eventually discover the real language. Having said this, I find the language quite nice and it is a good live example how to create a simple systems programming language with GC, which allows the creation of a real operating system. Funny enough, the way Go binds methods to interfaces is similar to Component Pascal, an Oberon's sucessor. -- Paulo "spir" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On 02/03/2011 12:31 AM, bearophile wrote: >> Walter: >> >>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0 >> >> I have one comment about one thing said by bnolsen: >> >>> Simplicity + Orthogonality == win.< > > I would like people who state such phrases to all spend 3 months (only) > programming exclusively in Oberon. From some point of view, it may > probably be considered the best language ever. Twice as expressive as > Modula with half of its features. It brings one the full power of > imperative, structured, object-oriented paradigms in a language > /completely/ described in 13 (!) pages of plain text. > It is a wonderful incarnation of the core any modern language should > possess, and how to do it properly. Language designers of the mainstream > paradigm could just start with Oberon as a clean, pure, safe, pedestal and > just build on it. > For a full set of reasons, probably, Oberon has not had any success. Among > them (?) the obsession of those guys at ETH Zürich at /not/ considering > practicality as beeing of any worth, I guess ;-) This transforms > programming in Oberon --a potentially enthusiasmic experience at first > sight-- into a battle of every instant against irritating corners, > annoying lacks, and against oneself to not explode one's screen out of > frustration. > >> What I want most is the language features to be implemented in a clean >> way, with a clear semantics, with very few bad interactions with other >> language features and very few pitfalls, and with a good clean syntax. If >> this is done well enough, then I am able to learn and use hundreds of >> features too (and lots of keywords). > > Oberon is all what you ask for in the first sentence. On the other hand, > just /listing/ features D provides and Oberon does not would require > pages. Actually, its feature set is radically minuscule (and even more > when compared to its expressive power, I guess); this does not ensure > cleanness, consistency and orthogonality, indeed; but it may be impossible > to achieve those qualities as soon as features grow in number and, > primarily, in diversity. I guess, in fact, it is extremely difficult even > for super simple toy languages. Successes (from this point of view) like > Oberon are rarissim as far as I know. (*) > > Denis > > (*) Even Pascal & Modula did not reach this point; precisely, Oberon > abandoned some of their features like enums and subrange types. > -- > _________________ > vita es estrany > spir.wikidot.com >
