[Oberon] Oberon for a C++ user.

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Lars:

first, BlackBox is not very COM oriented. The first releases of BlackBox offered COM as an extra feature. You could use BB without paying for that feature. Later on they released the whole BB with COM. 

> Did BlackBox offer something that couldn't have been done with Visual C++, Python, or Delphi/Lazarus? 

Yes and no. No, because you can accomplish any task in any language. Every particular language is superfluous. It is just the question how long it takes. So BlackBox was not necessary and the goal could have been achieved otherwise. Not by me, though. I did not know the tools you mentioned. Someone else would have been hired.

> Was it a particular hardware module of code that helped to interact with the hardware, a particular feature of
> BlackBox as an IDE? It made development much quicker, or just easier because of some specific reason?

You will find answers in my BB_Class presentation. 

Concerning BlackBox, it was my first serious use of that tool. When I took the charge, I was aware of the existence of Lib by Robert Campbell. You have probably never heard of Lib. I suggest to have a look at the Component Pascal Collection. Robert is a mathematician. He developed an impeccable  programming style. Robert helped me to get started and then answered my many questions and also modified a few of his tools for me. he helped me a lot. I am indebted to him personally.

> One thing I like about Component Pascal BlackBox, is you can bind a button click 
> to a regular procedure, without it being object oriented or a method
> of an object. In Delphi, all IDE glue that holds the application together
> is object oriented, whereas in Component Pascal you can use regular simple
> non OO procedures to bind to buttons and other widgets.

Blackbox has this subsystem named Forms, which is based on metaprogramming. It is genial. I explained some of it in my presentation. I do not know if this solution is unique in the industry. Maybe they took it from somewhere else.

BlackBox cuts the GUI development time by some 90%. It let me focus on solving the problem rather than on the mechanics of the GUI. Without that tool I would have followed the usual programming pain, where 90% of time is spent on GUI.  Under BlackBox 90% of effort goes into solving the problem, while 10% is spent on packaging. 

In retrospect, I could have used IGOR. It is also a very productive problem solving environment. However, I think that Lib is so powerful and so unique that together with BlackBox metaprogramming it was better than IGOR in this particular case.

I hope that these ramblings were not too off the mark.

Wojtek