What does HackerNews think of OberonEmulator?

You would love Oberon, and its derived OSes, Acme UI is based on it.

In Oberon, you can select any piece of text and apply a command on it.

Commands are public procedures in dynamic modules, so Module.Command will load it if not already loaded, and then execute command.

There are a couple of ways to write commands, depending if the act on selected widgets, selected text, selected windows, or if they ask for additional input.

http://www.projectoberon.net/

For trying out it emulated on the browser,

https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator

And how the latest iteration of it, Bluebottle (AOS) with Active Oberon, looks like

http://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=com...

One of the great things about PowerShell and Windows, is that despite all the warts it has, it allows exactly a similar kind of workflow, with .NET, DLLs and COM replacing that Module.Command experience.

GNOME and KDE can offer similar workflows, alongside DBUS, and fish shell, however people seem more keen in keeping the UNIX experience of yore instead of going down that route.

You're catching downvotes (have some goddamned respect people) but I'm facing this choice right now.

I have a project that involves a compiler written in Prolog targeting Prof. Wirth's RISC chip (for Project Oberon[1]), and I want to make it easily accessible.

I can use e.g. TCL/Tk/Tkinter/Python+SWI-Prolog, and make a native app that the user has to install... or...

There is a Prolog in JS[2], and an emulator for the chip in JS[3], and rich widget frameworks (I like Knockout[4], but there are literally dozens in JS), so it's pretty easy to make a SPA that shows off the code (literate programming style) along with live compilation and emulation, and you can even let users save their work[5]. "Installation" is just visiting the page.

I keep trying to come up with reasons NOT to go that route (out of some perhaps-misplaced JS prejudice) and I can't.

> There's really no need for X-Windows or Wayland any more.

Indeed!

[1] http://www.projectoberon.com/

[2] Tau Prolog http://tau-prolog.org/

[3] http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator

[4] https://knockoutjs.com/

[5] https://calroc.github.io/HulloWurld/Hullo.html

Niklaus Wirth is an amazing engineer/computer scientist, unfortunately he is often unknown by new generations (especially later achievements, like Oberon). I was inspired by his work and never ending quest for simple and effective solutions.

If enough people are interested in this project, I am planning to write a blog post series dissecting and explaining the code base (given the small size it should be feasible). Another idea is to port the whole Project Oberon to the JVM like this project https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator, with the difference that the code will run at full speed since there is no emulation involved.