[Oberon] Communicating with aliens

[Lars O]

Paul Reed wrote:
> Hi Lars,
>
>
>> Or how about communication? i.e. why doesn't Wirth participate in
>> developer discussions regarding languages? ...Is [W]irth an alien?
>>
>
> Are you a troll?
>

Not quite. I'm a delphi/freepascal/golang programmer, and I've written
quite a few tools for the delphi fpc community. Every time I dip into
Oberon and try to convert a lot of my source code over to oberon, I end up
quitting oberon and going straight back to delphi/fpc/golang because....
oberon didn't get strings right, never has, just like Pascal didn't get
them right and C took over because of it.

>
> Actually, I never considered the alien angle, maybe it explains a lot.  A
>  benevolent gentle alien race he comes from then...
>
> But seriously, I think maybe you need to consider that he's written an
> awful lot of good stuff on his subject, as Bob says, which is still readily
> available for all to read

I've read a lot of his material, and there is no reply to it, i.e. no web
forum, no bug reporting system. He releases a compiler and doesn't offer
an error reporting system. This is 2016, not 1970. People reply to books,
and compilers, using something called web forums, mailing lists, error
reporting systems (Borland called it "quality central")..

You don't release a compiler and then disappear off planet earth without
providing any interaction/communication whatsoever. It just doesn't work
that way in 2016. I could care less if someone is retired, that's not an
excuse. Being retired literally means you have WAY more time to actually
interact with people because you have no work to attend to (8 to 5 job).

What this is, is pure arrogance assuming that you the compiler writer got
everything correct and none of your users can ever interact with you.
Golang developers have blogs that you can reply to, mailing lists...
Oberon developers hide in Switzerland inside mountain caves or something.


> (that should be a starting point, rather than
> wasting his time with tired, re-hashed discussions which are very common

Oh trust me, he would not be wasting his time discussing strings, as he
has never got them right, ever since Pascal. There's a reason pointers to
chars in C took over the world, and there is a reason that massive
quantities of people are using PHP and Golang and C++ and visual basic....
it's got little to do with features like OOP and everything to do with
garbage collected strings or reference counted strings. Wirth never has,
and never will understand this, that our internet and computer systems now
revolve around strings.

Oberon is a great language except for strings. Oh and one other mistake
made was following ada's direction with verbose END procedurename which
isn't needed, as END is already clear enough. But no discussion available
on this, we are just to accept the language as is, or make (cough) a fork
of his compilers to develop our own tools... That's what GoLang is, it's a
fork of oberon. Everything in GoLang reeks of oberon smell, but they added
strings and goroutines, and changed the syntax to use curly braces.


> Prof. Wirth closed the symposium by briefly describing his career
> (several
> retrospectives of which he has presented elsewhere) and then went into
> detail about Project Oberon and its 2013 update.  The recordings of all
> the talks of the symposium are at
>

Again, this is where he talks: at cheese and wine conferences. Not to
actual developers or anyone that can make a difference, i.e. programmers
like myself who have been using modula/pascal oriented compilers for over
10 years. He just talks at these conferences in the "echo chamber".