[Oberon] V4 versus S3 survey

[Bob Walkden]

Something is successful to the extent that it achieves its stated aims. I have used Oberon since (I think) the late 80s or early 90s, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen what you are describing stated as one of its aims, by its authors.

What I have seen is the ideas of Oberon increasingly, and often explicitly, adopted by more mainstream languages, such as Java, Go, C#. So it has at least been a very influential language / system, and while the languages cited may fall some way short of the jewel-like perfection of Oberon, at least they are significant improvements on most their predecessors, thanks to Oberon.



For Oberon to have succeeded, it would have needed to be
embraced by *at least* one large platform provider. Microsoft
in the late 1990s would have been such a case, but ETH
completely missed out on that - even though they were
quite involved with Oberon on .Net around that time. In
the end, Microsoft ended up releasing C#. That closed
that window of opportunity.


Today, I don’t think there is much chance that Oberon will
ever come back to life again, as all major players (Microsoft,
Google, Apple, Linux/Unix..) now already have their own
“modern” languages (C#, Go, Swift, Java,..). Despite the
apparent weaknesses of some (all?) of these languages, they
won’t go away anytime soon. The investment is too high,
the code base too large. The bandwagon has left.


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