[Oberon] Inexpensive Hardware: Cost vs Objectives

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> skulski at pas.rochester.edu
> Sent: Tuesday, 16 February 2016 4:50 PM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Inexpensive Hardware: Cost vs Objectives
> 
> 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.
...
...
> 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.
> 

I'm pleased to accept the compliments but that is not really true in my case
- approximately 95% of my company's income is derived from products aimed at
the general public not developers. 

In the early 2000's I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the poor
quality of software development tools that I was having to fight with rather
than use. I had the good fortune to read a couple of papers that Paul Reed
wrote about that time: "Building Your Own Tools - An Oberon Industrial Case
Study" and a follow-up: "An Oberon Linker for an Imperfect World - More
Notes on Building Your Own Tools". Up until that point I had labelled myself
professionally purely as an Application Developer. He made me realise that I
didn't have to be a rocket scientist or compiler expert to build on and
adapt Wirth's brilliant work. All I had to do was take a deep breath and
dive in. 

Consequently, my most recent audio-related product now uses components
written using Oberon software developed using my own tools. It was a
significantly less painful exercise to develop and has required next to no
maintenance effort ever since. 

Cheers,
Chris