> The problem is that this language was designed in the 1980s and still today > nobody knows it. Why? I don't know. Maybe it was because "the industry took > off", but it was miles ahead of both Ada and C++. Oberon was a very well > designed language.
Oberon is actually unusable by today's standards: * No sum types. * No generics. * No growable arrays. * No concurrency or parallelism story. * Simple mark&sweep GC that "stops the world" and if you want to do better than that pretty much all of Oberon's implementation simplicity vanishes. * Multiple dialects exist and it's never clear what Oberon actually means. The Oberon that removed the `for` loop? The one that added it back? The Oberon that added exceptions and iterators? But even by yesterday's standards it really was worse than C++ and Ada. That is Oberon the language. Oberon the OS was impressive but there is no reason to believe it would have kept its simplicity if enough users dragged it into the mainstream. I'm also not sure if it wins prizes when compared to a Lisp machine.
