Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in.
Extremely poor taste.
by lysace - They use Yandex for e-mail, so probably a Russian group behind this.
- > Extremely poor taste.
How so?
by eschaton - I think some of the devs are Russian and a quick scan of the video doesn't show anything other than a shared screen for the bulk of the time (using the mouse to grab the time pointer and move it quickly through the length of the presentation).by shrubble
- I suppose it's just imagery from the heyday of Wirth's Oberon, ca 1987.
BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.
by nine_k - Wonder why they still haven't got their spark-like proof system from Ada. Would be more worth than playing with the graphics stuff, they added.by rurban
- I think this type of IDE was one of my favourites over the years.
There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.
by stuaxo - For me the power of Object Pascal and Delphi was the ability to create reusable components that could be easily installed into the IDE. These components had powerful property sheets which could be used to set the values for their various properties etc.
Lazarus does fill that gap but somehow doesn't quite have the same feeling as the original Delphi.
The Free Oberon IDE looks like Turbo Pascal development enviroment from the late 80s and the early 90s. I wonder if it would have the concept of reusable components.
by pkphilip - What's unfortunate about those components is that they are in fact part of the dev environment. I really wish they were fully contained in the project and then dynamically loaded along with it. GetIt ever so slightly improved the situation, but still. At this point basically nothing else could get me to ever upgrade anymore. Lazarus doesn't do any better, but there at least you could vendor the entire IDE.by thijsvandien
- Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting.
Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.
by sys42590 - > nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious
Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.
by Rochus - Can't wait to try this on Mac (English manual install intstructions at https://github.com/kekcleader/FreeOberon/commit/489c5a929bf9...). I feel like Oberon is very much worth a look for people interested in small, powerful languages.by tomcam
- The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.by WillAdams
- Tangentially related, but I hope will be appreciated by the nostalgic people here:
Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article:
https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt
It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.
by adalacelove - A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on.
Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.
That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)
by SwellJoe - I usually install Lazarus on my pc though seldom use it now. Still want to pick it up someday to compensate my miss in childhood. Only used turbo C then.by alexwwang
- > Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.
You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.
https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert)
by lysace - My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.by Barrin92
- I am so glad to have had the luck to learn coding via various BASIC flavours, Turbo Pascal, Z80, 8086 Assembly before getting into C and C++, as I wasn't tainted about C being God's revelation for systems programming, that many seem to have.
After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.
On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.
I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.
The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.
by pjmlp - For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that didn’t need it - was actually much faster in TP. It was, in my eyes, the perfect blend of easy on the eyes syntax, blazingly fast compilation and runtime and small easy to share executables.
Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!
So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)
by wood_spirit