[Oberon] Oberon language family and the master.

[Lars]

On Thu, January 21, 2016 8:54 am, Srinivas Nayak wrote:
> Dear All,
>
>
> I am referring to
> http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/archives/languagearchive/genealogy.
> Here we see that Oberon language from its birth has gone through
> several
> revisions
....

? After all these iterations, Oberon might have got time
> tested. So today, can we say, whatever is present in Oberon-7 is time
> tested; and one doesn't need to add or remove anything from it

The issue is discussed by the Ada advocate I believe.... Someone who was
part of Ada once said that Niklaus Wirth believes in small solutions for
big problems and sometimes you need a big solution for big problems and
Wirth apparently is wrong, according to the Ada person. Wirth and others
are critical of large languages like Ada, but at the same time Wirth's
small languages leave you wondering if you need that one feature that BIG
language has. MAINSAIL is an interesting programming language that Wirth,
Dijkstra, and other minimalists would probably hate with their guts. Even
Algol got too big which is why Wirth forked it, but Algol had some
interesting features... that people are using today, probably mistakenly,
like being able to declare a variable anywhere not just at the top of a
function.  ...

Oberon is not an Ada, nor is it MAINSAIL, it's more like a Jib Sail..

The small sail..

> If so, one wouldn't worry about
> Oberon V,
> Oberon X,
> Active Oberon,
> Action Oberon,
> Object Oberon,
> Concurrent Oberon
> etc. etc.


This is once again evidence that Wirth and his followers believe in small
solutions for big problems, so instead of creating a single unified
language, like say, Lisp, they create several different ones because each
one is lacking...

This is a double edged sword issue.. sometimes small minimal solutions are
nice, other times "everything and the kitchen sink" (emacs references) can
be nice.

I personally am a minimalist, but find myself being a medium-ist at times.

So no, it's really not time tested.. nothing really is... most
importantly, it's not popular, which is not so good... as you don't have
"people tested" .... there is no bug report system for people to report
to, and the founder of Oberon himself, never chats or talks with anyone
who uses the language other than a close knit group who go to infamous
oberon meetups every few years.  Whereas other tools have active founders
who contribute to mailing lists, oberon is a strange (almost alien) way of
development. It's good and it's bad.. Different indeed.