[Oberon] [EXT] Re: Oberon in the wild

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 22 Jul 2020 at 19:25, Skulski, Wojciech
<skulski at pas.rochester.edu> wrote:
>
> Liam:
[...]
> From your profile you are a British nobleman living in some remote country. It must require a lot of determination.

Nobleman! Gosh. :-D And I never knew!

Djęnkuje bardzo.  I am afraid I am just a commoner, and while Czechia
is remote from Britain, to be honest, I see that as an advantage these
days. I'm much closer to Germany, Austria, Poland, Slovakia and
Hungary than I have ever been to so many different countries in my
life before. I find it amazing that I can get onto an inexpensive
train and travel to so many places.

I've been studying Czech since I got here but it is astonishingly
complex and difficult (2 plurals for all nouns (2-4 & 5+),  4 genders
and 7 cases are just the beginning) and I am quite old (52 now) so it
is very slow work. Nie znam Polskiego. :-(

> The Russian effort is very remarkable. I am wondering why they are pursuing a path which the Swiss originators themselves have almost abandoned.

I wonder the same.  I have not asked yet.

I have a couple of hypotheses...
[1] there was a decades-long tradition of copying _and improving_
Western hardware and software in Communist countries which were not
allowed to import the real thing.
[2] even now, overall, they are poorer countries, with a tradition of
making the most of limited resources. Modern software is appallingly
bloated and slow -- for instance, in my day job, I sometimes use the
Atom editor.

Atom is a plain text editor. The compressed download is 179MB -- it
expands to several times that, and can easily use several gigabytes of
RAM. The editor is written in Javascript and embeds a complete
Chromium-based web browser with a JIT-compiler for Javascript,
displaying text by rendering it as web content.

When that is regarded as a good modern editor -- and Microsoft's
Visual Studio code uses the same technology and is of comparable size,
and is becoming hugely popular -- then I can understand people being
interested in lightweight alternative OSes when otherwise they need a
multicore 64-bit machine with 16GB of RAM which costs as much as a
year's pay.


-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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