Project Oberon
Project Oberon contains a definition of the Oberon Language and describes its relation to Modula-2 and the software tools developed with the system. This definitive, first-hand account of the design, development, and implementation of Oberon completes the Oberon trilogy.
Stats for nerds
30recommend
129mentions
53people
2009–2026years
51% recommend49% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- People unaware of Project Oberon should rather have a look at https://projectoberon.net/ where they can find the free book and additional material by Prof. Wirth.
- Let’s all take a moment to remember Nikolas Wirth and Project Oberon and its fpga processor. I learned so much from reading his books. They are very accessible and I recommend them to anyone!
- Anyone with a spare Micro-SD Card and a Raspberry Pi 5 should try:
http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/project-oberon/obe...
- I love this! I have done a lot of CS research lately, and some of these I haven’t come across yet.
Let me share some of my favourites not listed here, off the top of my head:
- Ian Piumarta’s “Open, Extensible Object Models” (https://www.piumarta.com/software/id-objmodel/objmodel2.pdf) is about creating the most minimal object-oriented metaobject system that allows the maximum amount of freedom for the programmer. It basically only defines a message send operation, everything else can be changed at runtime. The practical counterpart to the dense “Art of the Metaobject Protocol” book.
- John Ousterhout “Scripting: Higher-Level Programming for the 21st Century” (https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pd...) - not really a paper, but an article from the creator of Tcl about the dichotomy between systems programming languages and scripting languages. Obvious at first sight, the lessons therein have wide ramifications IMO. We always seek the perfect multi-paradigm language that can do anything at high performance with the most productivity, while perhaps it is best to have compiled, fast, clunky systems languages paired with ergonomic, flexible interpreted frontend. Often all you need is C+Tcl in the same app. A must-read for anyone writing yet another programming language.
- Niklaus Wirth's Project Oberon (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/) is the implementation of an entire computer system, from the high-level UI down to kernel, compiler, and a RISC-like CPU architecture. He wrote the seminal "plea for lean software" and actually walked the walk. A long lost art in the era of dependency hell and towering abstractions from mediocre coders.
- I would LOVE to build a modern-day operating system using a high-level programming language, even if it were just a pedagogical toy. I love Unix, but it’s not (and shouldn’t be) the final word on OS design.
In the meanwhile, Project Oberon from the late Niklaus Wirth (http://www.projectoberon.net/) is a good example of a pedagogical operating system (and programming language) that isn’t Unix. Project Oberon was heavily influenced by the Cedar and Mesa projects at Xerox PARC.
- > Project Oberon is an amazing piece of computer science and amazing tool for teaching. The book and the code demonstrate, without any tiny amount of doubt, that it is possible to build a usable computing system small enough to fit in the head of a normal programmer. That, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a truly great achievement and I am in awe of Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht for it.
As I wrote in an earlier post, the enthusiasm of the author is contagious.
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