Rochus

I'm only aware of Brandis’s thesis who did optimizations on a subset of Oberon for the PPC architecture. There was also a JIT compiler, but not particularly optimized. OP2 was the prevalent compi…

Show me significant concepts implemented in today's languages which cannot directly be traced back to "things that were important in 1960-s" or seventies ;-)

I don't know. Unfortunately we don't have an Oberon compiler doing similar optimization as e.g. GCC, so we can only speculate. I did measurements some time ago to compare a typical Oberon co…

The "OS" (or rather "kernel") was actually the VM which was implemented in microcode and BCPL. The Smalltalk code within the image was completely abstracted away from the physical …

Oberon is both a programming language and an operating system used mostly for teaching, much like e.g. xv6 or xinu. Similar to the latter, Wirth has written text books about the system, some of which …

Thanks. In contrast to Smalltalk or Lisp, Oberon is originally a native language, and the Oberon System originally was conceived as the native operating system of the Ceres computer used for teaching …

Thanks. There is actually also an i386 version of the system in the repository, where I modified the kernel so it runs with Multiboot, making installations much easier. An essential achievement for bo…

Nice figures, but actually just a presentation, not a theory. Apparently based on this book: https://bookerapp.replit.app/book/fom , which neither seems to actually explain much. …

There is no inherrent reason why no new programming languages should be developed in the age of AI. As long as people are programming, there will be new languages. As there are still people playing tr…

> ..., fix timing issues. Which might behave pretty differently on the specific hardware; getting the simulation correct is only a fraction of the path. A lot more is necessary, and usually you s…

Maybe Espressif will notice that there are no RV32 chips with MMU so far (at least to my knowledge); we only have 32 bit MCUs or then only 64 bits for the CPUs. Something like Cortex-A7 is missing.

They claim that the chip has an "MMU". But unfortunately this doesn't seem to be a true RISC-V MMU (according to the Sv32 specification) integrated into the CPU core itself, but just a …

My migration from the Oberon System 3 to the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 comes at just the right time as it seems (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native/release..…

" Common Lisp is the most powerful programming language in history. Emacs is the most powerful text editor in history. " .. " I’m a former English teacher (ALT) and current freelance so…

Cool. Reminds me of Nodal (see https://nodalmusic.com/ ).

Well, I think instead of the article's functional utopia, there will be the same pragmatic programming language adoption as in the past. Cutting-edge AI and programming language research is alrea…

This is cool. Did you have a look at the Olimex ESP32-P4 board which has a HDMI socket? Have you implemented all hardware drivers yourself, or could you reuse IDF or thirdparty code?

Refers to the May 2025 edition.

> Mauchly was actually interesting in using computers for weather modeling and I’m sure that influenced the design of ENIAC True. Mauchly was a physics professor interested in meterology, and he kn…

> The Z3 was only general purpose by accident ... ENIAC [..] was the first intentionally general purpose computer That's a pretty academic take. Neither Eckert, nor Mauchly, nor Zuse knew abou…

Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both int…

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00854 (2024)

The fascination of HN for Habermas is really astonishing. According to Algolia we are going towards 20 posts ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..…

For me (60 too) it's both, the journey and the destination. LLMs not only help me get around the boring stuff so I have more time for the things I really want to design and build, but they also o…

That's interesting, thanks. Some of the things you listed (dangling else, variant records, Wirth has fixed in Modula-2 or Oberon). Algol 68 seems to have perfected the procedural paradigm.

> ALGOL 68 was much better than the ALGOL W .. or any of the languages designed later by Wirth. In what respects particularly?

Sure. I could delegate the boring stuff to an agent and focus on what I'm interested in. It would make me more productive, if I could e.g. just let the agent generate an optimizer and code genera…

Cool. But what is the core benefit, i.e. in what respect is it preferable to existing systems? Which systems are the major competitors (if any)?

Nice. How does it compare to e.g. Common Music or Nyquist (besides Python vs SAL or LISP)? Are there audio examples of the interesting things it can better do than other algorithmic composition or liv…