[Oberon] Oberon Documentation

[Paul Reed]

There have been discussions here and elsewhere about
the fragmented nature of the documentation for the 
various Oberon systems.

In my opinion, one of the greatest handicaps to new
users of Oberon is that the three original Oberon books
are not now easily available.

These are Martin Reiser's User Guide and Programmer's
Manual, Reiser and Wirth's Programming in Oberon, and
Wirth and Juerg Gutknecht's Project Oberon (see the
Oberon Bibliography on ETH's website - I'm not
writing this online :] ).

Not only are these books a joy to read, but importantly
they strongly proclaim the Oberon philosophy ("keep it
as simple as possible, but not simpler").  This tenet
is rather taken for granted in some subsequent 
documentation.

The philosophy of "how can we make it simpler" rather
than "how can we add more features" can be a bit of
a shock to users of other software systems, particularly
Windows and Linux.

Thanks to Pieter Muller, I actually have a Ceres 3 computer
sitting on my desk. I sometimes invite people to guess the
size of the operating system after they have seen a
quick demonstration.  3-4MB has been the lowest guess
so far, which is a factor of 20 too big.

It was only possible to achieve this economy by starting
again and deciding what is essential, and what are "bells
and whistles".  The lack of the latter in the Oberon
systems can lead some people to long for the warm fuzzy 
feeling you get when using other OSs.

Since discovering Project Oberon in a computer bookshop
in London in 1996, I haven't looked back.  I don't use 
the Oberon System as my primary OS, although I escaped
from Windows and have been using FreeBSD for the last
18 months.  However, Oberon is my primary programming 
language since I developed a DOS, Win32 and Unix Oberon 
compiler based on Wirth's original; see proceedings of the
Joint Modular Languages Conference (JMLC) 2000.

I strongly recommmend people to read some of the early
writings about Oberon before slagging it off or just 
becoming frustrated.  You'll need to find a good library
though (remember those?).  Take the Oberon bibliography.

If you only read one book on the subject, make it Project 
Oberon.  If you only read one paper, make it Wirth's more 
recent "A Plea for Lean Software".  If you can't get to a 
library and you only have 20 minutes, read Wirth's last 
ETH paper, "An Essay on Programming" (this last is available
on-line).

So, to finish my "Oberon Changed My Life" rant, I recommend
(i) read some Old Testament stuff, (ii) find a 3-button
mouse, and (iii) don't try using Oberon as your main OS
or even on your main machine until you've decided what (for 
you) is essential, and what's "bells and whistles".

Paul Reed
Managing Director, Padded Cell Software Ltd
www.paddedcell.com