pdw
skoodge
Are there any "guided" walkthroughs for someone who has never used Oberon (or any of its later versions like Bluebottle or A2) that demonstrate its most unique UI/UX aspects? Something along the lines of Russ Cox' Tour of the Acme Editor[0] but for Oberon?
Oberon seems fascinating and I would like to eventually play around with it in an emulator, but any resources that show how it's being used (as opposed to a description of its design like in Wirth's book for example) would be appreciated.
xkriva11
There is Ultibo based bare metal Oberon version too: https://github.com/MGreim/ultiboberon
owlstuffing
If this interests you, I highly recommend Luca Boasso’s oberonc project for the JVM[1].
lboasso
Author of oberonc here, thanks for trying it out :)
skoodge
The linked pdfs on that page are wonderful. I reread Wirth's Plea for Lean Software and it still holds up remarkably well. It reminded me of Alan Kay's VPRI and the STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming which unfortunately ended in 2012. Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell. Are there any similar projects that are still being actively worked on?
m_mueller
was there ever a post mortem on STEPS? I'd like to know what happened as the demoes and ideas they had looked awesome.
drob518
The paper archive is still up. There were various interim reports generated for STEPS. I assume there was a final report as well, but I don’t remember reading it, myself. Vpri.org still works.
I think this just a standard Raspberry Pi Linux distro with an emulator for "Project Oberon 2013" preloaded.
Oberon has a tortured version history, so it takes a bit to explain what "Project Oberon 2013" is, but it's basically representative of Oberon in a very early stage of development.
This version was originally described by Wirth in his 1992 book "Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System, a Compiler and a Computer". After his retirement he prepared a new edition, which came to be known as "Project Oberon 2013". For this edition he switched out the "computer" part -- the original used the now extremely obscure NS32000 CPU, the new edition used a custom RISC architecture implemented on an FPGA. But otherwise than this "implementation detail", the system was unchanged.
(And of course, given the FPGA source code, it's easy to build an emulator.)
But if you try this and it feels primitive -- it is. Later versions of Oberon got much fancier.