Oberon (2009)

Not only have I heard of Oberon, I've written code for it! The Oberon programming language is a nicer-than-average descendant of Pascal and Modula-2. The compiler was reasonably fast even in the 90s. The UI was strange enough to feel really interesting. As the article mentions, you could type a command anywhere and click it. And the older version I used had tiling windows, although this seems to have changed. But one especially neat feature is that the system was…

We used Oberon (the system and the language) in our 3rd year CS OS course in Stellenbosch in the mid 90's Interesting system, it's worth looking at since it has a few unexplored ideas. (I was less impressed the the language). I experienced it at about the same time as win3 / Win95 and X-Windows (before KDE/Gnome) and it compared favourably. I'm glad this post is calling attention to it, but I don't think the post does it much justice…

I said this and I will say it again. Oberon, the language, is the most delightful little thing to write a compiler for. Even more so in s-exp syntax. The canonical implementation is described in a 40 page tutorial by the MASTER himself, Wirth :-) People interested in alternative desktop and GUI environments should also look at all the biproduct research that came out of Plan9 (NB: there is a programming language called "Squeak" somewhere in there, it's not the…

Plan 9's UI works in a quite similar way. I'm not up to date on my history of those systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is heavy cross pollination between the two. Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera... --- The article linked to at the very beginning is not available…