[Oberon] V4 versus S3 survey

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Oberon isn’t exactly a growth story.

A couple questions:

1. Would it be better if it were a growth story? Better in what sense? Better for whom?

2. Assuming that "yes, it would be better", then why is it not? What is missing? What is wrong?

We all know how great it it is. Perhaps it makes sense to ask how bad it is. Why bad? 

Similar questions could be asked of BlackBox, but here the story is a bit different. BB was a commercial product whose marketing was not that great. Also the company had an idealistic vision of the users community (that is, programmers and developers) who were itching for a good language running in a good framework. Somehow the professional developers are different from what the company was thinking. So now BB has found another niche where it is reportedly doing well. 

But Oberon and Oberon System is doing even worse than BB, if we define "bad" as "very few users". So why?

W

________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Andreas Pirklbauer [andreas_pirklbauer at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2017 3:49 AM
To: ETH Oberon and related systems
Subject: [Oberon]  V4 versus S3 survey

> 1. The community is small. Assuming that 29 persons who
> responded (thank you!) represent 1/2 of the community,
> there are under 100 Oberon users worldwide.

That’s another way of saying that Oberon isn’t exactly a growth
story. There were more Oberon developers in the 90s..