[Oberon] Status quo?

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Andreas Kä?nner
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 February 2007 11:21 PM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Oberon] Status quo?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a Objective-C / Cocoa developer by trade. In my spare 
> time I look into other programming languages as well. Now I 
> found Oberon and I think it is amazing.
> I have some questions, which I hope will be answered by 
> someone on this
> list:
> 
> - is there something like an active developer community?

Yes - there are several groups of developers. As well as the ETH Oberon
community which you have already discovered, ones that I actively monitor
are: 

  Gardens Point Component Pascal (GPCP) 
  Oberon microsystems BlackBox Component Pascal (BB)
  POW! Oberon for Windows

(Note: Component Pascal is a small superset of Oberon-2 with enhancements
intended to suit commercial component-oriented programming).

These are all relatively small groups and activity is sporadic but
dedicated.

> - is Oberon mainly an academic or a commercial  endeavour or 
> is it driven by an Open Source community?

ETH Oberon is primarily academic.

Oberon microsystems is a commercial organisation that originated from ETH.
BlackBox started off as a commercial project (Oberon/F) in the early 90's
and became open source a couple of years ago.

  Website and mailing list: http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html

GPCP is an academic project from Queensland University of Technology, which
was originally funded by Microsoft as part of the .NET project

  Home page: http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/gpcp/

  News Group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GPCP/

POW! also was originally academic but is now supported by developers: 

  Website: http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/pow/Pow.htm

  News Group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Pow32

> - if someone wants to start programming in Oberon which 
> environment do you suggest? (In respect to support from the community)
> 

You should get enthusiastic assistance from any of the above groups - each
group is relatively small but very knowledgable and passionate about Oberon.
Perhaps if you identify your target platform(s) (e.g. Windows, .NET, Linux,
bare hardware) we can make some more refined suggestions.
 
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp