alt Hacker News> "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident,
No, it is not evident: this is not correct.
Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS.
> why do we care about this one in particular?
1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success.
(A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.)
2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal.
The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC.
Development did not end there.
Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon.
3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world.
> What does it do that other operating systems don't?
Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity.
https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code.
4k LOC.
The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix.
It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon.
https://blackboxframework.org/
It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.
Replies
> No, it is not evident: this is not correct.
It is evident. It is correct.
You aren't making this any better.
Borland Turbo Pascal for CP/M and MS-DOS was developed by Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to develop All The Languages for Microsoft.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Turbo Modula 2 for CP/M (which was certainly surpassed by Topspeed Modula 2) was developed by Martin Odersky, who created Scala.
Throw in Robert Griesemer and his co-creation of Go, and the Wirth family tree is as influential in modern programming as it possibly could be.