[Oberon] FPClike for Oberon

[Stéphane Aulery]

Hello,

All again;

Attention another long message. I approach the subject from another 
angle.
For me the question of the hardware is very clear and the choices are 
justified.


Le 16-02-2016 07:20, skulski at pas.rochester.edu a écrit :
> 
> Finally, it is a bit unfair to discount a magnificent effort by a very
> small team (Paul, NW, Magnus, Chris...) who are not motivated by money.
> The Oberon boards were meant to be development systems. They are great 
> and
> they are very cheap in their category. What is missing IMHO is a more
> clear vision of "what can be developed with those development systems".
> Here I can say that the said team is composed of professional 
> developers
> of development tools (languages, compilers, etc). So they developed 
> what
> they know: the development tools. The *product developers* are missing 
> in
> this community. As a consequence, there are no products.
> 
> To put it succinctly: the Oberon saw is very sharp thanks to the above
> team. But where is the wood which this saw could possibly cut? Well, 
> there
> is not much of it because the core team is mostly interested in 
> sharpening
> the saw. Nothing wrong with this, but we should be aware of the 
> situation.


I enter the world Oberon slowly and I would understand. What surprised 
me is that initially the team designed its OS for use about the 
university instead of an outside OS. But gradually, Windows, Linux, etc. 
have replaced the internal OS and Oberon (and others) became strictly a 
learning platform multifaceted. I misunderstand ?

It's a shame because a system with a healthy, open base could become a 
real alternative to Linux that goes in all directions. I am not 
criticizing the fact that Oberon must remain roughly in the same state 
to be a good subject to study.

I discovered Oberon somewhat randomly by searching the Pascal 
programming language because I am not satisfied with mainstream 
languages.

It is extraordinary since it seized the essence of structured 
programming, and that's justified I think not handle character strings 
and other features in the heart of language. What is missing is a 
compiler, standard libraries and a single development environment and 
package as FPC outside Oberon / A2, etc.

I understand the frustration of Lars about strings, because it is a 
basic tool of every day for the user application development (web, DB 
etc). But his words are rather severe. The job of a university professor 
is to pave the way through education and research, not to implement the 
knowledge in everyday life. I myself am a little programmer and not an 
engineer / doctor (BTS in France), but I know recognize the value of 
things.

Are people trying to give his own life to the Oberon language outside a 
context of study, or are interested in this job? Did I rock my breath 
because Oberon could never achieve this goal despite all its qualities?

Regards,

-- 
Stéphane Aulery