Item — HN Reader

> my bias against them is very strong

Why? OO is just a tool like any other (e.g. functional etc. programming). From an engineering perspective (where engineering is essentially the art of solving problems using technical means), making a fundamental a priori decision for or against a particular tool makes little sense.

Oberon and Plan9 are indeed completely different. Oberon is in addition both a programming language (with OO features) and an Operating system (using those features). I wouldn't "use" either. Both are very valuable for studying and experimenting. Oberon excels in "minimalism" ("write a decently complete operating system with very little effort and means"), while Plan9 is the "spiritual successor" of Unix which refined existing concepts and added innovations (e.g. for multithreading and inter-thread communication). The answer to your questions depends on your specific situation. If you're a student then I would recommend to optimize your time for what you would like to do professionally later. Universities tend to be "ivory towers", feeding students a lot of stuff for historic or "academic" (i.e. random preference and interest of the professors) reasons with little respect for "efficiency" (i.e. usefulness per hours spent). Basics are very important, but the "basics" which you learn at universties in "computer science" are rather overrated and not very useful for most people, in my humble opinion. I would recommmend to read books and experiment with different programming paradignms and languages, if you want to go for a programming career How operating systems work is mostly important if you want to build them yourself professionally or do low-level programming like OS drivers or embedded systems. My answer is therefore somewhat more general than you might have hoped for, but it depends greatly on where you are now and where you want to go.

If you want a 'step-by-step tutorial' like the phil-opp blog, Oberon is actually closer to that experience. The 'Project Oberon' book literally builds the compiler and OS from scratch. Plan 9 is different; it's a production research system, so you learn it by reading the source and man pages, not by building it.

"Why?"

Because of what Raymond said. He said two things that I remember fairly clearly:

1) If you have to resort to OO to solve your problems, you probably have another unresolved problem at a higher level. This is from near the beginning of the book.

2) OO succeeds mainly by increasing the global complexity of the problem.

All I'm doing is answering your question. It is true I wasn't totally clear about this. It is very clear that you understand his detailed logic better than I do. Reading the rest of your post now.

Ok, I see. Raymond wrote this in 2003, at the peak height of "Java OO madness" where deep inheritance and over-engineered, totally inefficient systems were common. In The Art of Unix Programming, Raymond clarifies that he isn't against "objects" as a conceptual tool but against the "gospel of OO" that dominated the 1990s. His main argument is not that OO is inherently "evil", but that OO designs often become "spaghetti-like tangles" of inheritance hierarchies that hide logic behind "thick layers of glue". He represents the "Unix Philosophy", which is a specific culture, and he was writing to defend this culture against the rising tide of Java and C++, which he saw as a threat to the simplicity and "text-based" interoperability of Unix. Interestingly, Wirth’s Oberon and OO approach actually aligns well with much of Raymond's philosophy. Raymond would certainly agree that OO is just one of many tools in the toolbox of an engineer, and our job is it to chose the right tools for the job.

Well, we basically agree on how I should go about it, which is good :-)

Jehanne is now on my radar..