It's interesting that Odersky started with Modula-2 (implementing a Z80 compiler), did a PhD with Wirth, but there discovered that functional programming offered a level of theoretical rigor and mathematical elegance he missed in Wirth's imperative languages. Wirth was generally critical of the complexity and abstraction often associated with functional languages. Rather than rejecting Wirth's pragmatism, he carried it forward by attempting to make functional programming "industry-ready".
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I can relate to Odersky, similar to him, while I appreciate Niklaus Wirth's work, I don't appreciate the quest to minimalism that he went down after Oberon.
For me the right path is Oberon => Oberon-2 and Component Pascal => Zonnon and Active Oberon.
Yes, I know he wasn't directly evolved with those ones.
I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the industry.
Something that Niklaus Wirth complained about in his rant about Software Engineering, not understanding why Java and C++ and not Oberon won the hearts of companies.
I was fortunate to attend his Oberon session on Oberon Day at CERN, 20 years ago, while a genius programming language designer, expecting software engineers to recognise great design and naturally embracing it, was expecting too much.
Minimalism is indeed the correct term (usually framed as simplicity) when looking at both, language and documentation. But at least it helped that there was always a working compiler and system, not a mere theory.
> I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the industry.
His main motivation was to minimize the amount of work porting his original system to his own, FPGA based processor board. His fans interpreted the “new” language more as a new prophetic proclamation, but in reality it was only about the feasibility of his post-retirement hobby project. This became clear at the latest when people wanted to run a benchmark on the system and discovered that the compiler couldn’t generate such large binaries. There was simply a fixed maximum size, but for many years no one noticed this.
He has always positioned his languages for education and limited himself to the systems that can be realized with them. If his goal had been to meet the needs of industry, he would have acted differently. After a very brief foray to an industrial job in the sixties, he immediately returned to academia and hardly looked back.
One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry, after all the dialects that sprung out of it, which he wasn't keen on, with the influence from Mesa, after his sabbatical at Xerox.
Also that the way it failed to be embraced by the industry, too busy with UNIX, C and C++, also had an effect on his point of view going forward.
> One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry
There is no evidence that Wirth e.g. ever directly or specifically rebutted Kernighan's famous paper, nor that Modula-2 was a response to it. Modula-2 was a child of the ivory tower (PARC), not industry. Wirth was rather an "escapist" who built his own worlds rather than fixing the real one. He saw Parnas' concepts "in action" during his sabbatical at Xerox. He didn't create Modula-2 to help industry; he created it because he wanted to replicate the Alto workstation experience (which became the Lilith) for his own use and for his students at ETH. Wirth was a brilliant "synthesizer" of academic ideas (Parnas, Hoare, Mesa) who built beautiful, self-contained gardens for himself and his students. He was never the "industrial repairman" that later apologists tried to paint him as.
Why should he?
That paper was only relevant among UNIX people, and largely ignored by anyone doing 8 and 16 bit home computing with Pascal and Modula-2.
It is no accident that to this day, it is the UNIX accolades that keep bringing it back every couple of months, most of whom never used a single Pascal compiler in their lifes, or aware that Modula-2 was already around.
Modula-2 relevance as systems language is quite easy to find out in some of his essays, and the companies selling compilers for Acorn, Amiga and PC.
You said that "One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry". By 1981, the C/Unix team was no longer a "rogue research group" in a closet; they were the architects of the dominant industrial paradigm shift (with Apollo Computer, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and even Microsoft all using Unix and C). That's why I mentioned it. Wirth didn't care because his concern wasn't industry. Pascal users helped themselves: e.g. Lisa Pascal essentially included all features from C, which according to Kernighan (who referred to Wirth's original Pascal, not the derivatives) were missing, and even a module and separate compilation concept (four years before Turbo Pascal); they could have used Modula-2, which was around at the time. While Modula-2 was hypothetically a "systems language", it lacked the pragmatic "dirty" features that C, Lisa Pascal, and Turbo Pascal embraced to actually build operating systems and drivers on commodity hardware (unless, again, they were added as an extension by the compiler vendors). E.g. Topspeed Modula supported inline assembly, Acorn Modula included extensions to call software interrupts directly with register mapping; almost all commercial vendors added extensions to bypass strict typing, or direct pointer increment/decrement to support C-style array traversal.
It is irritating that apparently C is fine having endless compiler extensions without which ISO C is equally unusable to implement an operating system[0], a sign of greatness, while the same argument is used to point out as design flaws when it isn't C we are talking about.
[0] - Unless helped by an external assembler, just like on the UNIX rewrite, when K&R C was initially created.
It is, of course, well known – or at the very least frequently and enthusiastically repeated – that a suitably drunk Odersky devised Scala whilst watching a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ad[0].