A tribute to Niklaus Wirth

If you haven't heard of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon or you haven't seen it, you should check it out. Messing with it reminded me of when I first learned Smalltalk in 1988. There's an air of playfulness and potential to it, just like in Smalltalk-80. The current version of Smalltalk is called Squeak and it's well worth checking out as well.

Oberon is sort of a Pascal take on Smalltalk. Like Smalltalk, it's both a language and an environment. Like Smalltalk, it has built-in programming tools (compiler, editor, etc), and it's interactive; you're programming "in" the language, so the edit-compile-run cycle is VERY tight (like when you're using the scala command and you can evaluate expressions). Oberon's environment was similar to Smalltalk's, but had some major differences and innovations, the most valuable one being (in my opinion) that you can click on a word anywhere in the environment and it will attempt to execute it as a command. There are other innovations too, but that's my favorite.

Harnessing this capability, Rob Pike at AT&T based a text editor/shell on Oberon as part of Plan 9, called Acme. Then, Gary Capell made Wily for Unix. Then, in 2002, I made one based on Wily for Ruby, called Meep. And THEN, I rewrote it in Java and renamed it "Ober," to point back to Oberon (and because ober means "waiter" in German). Somewhere along the line, I don't remember whether it was in Meep or just Ober, I added a "namespace" twist, to allow scoped commands, like Oberon has, but identified in the "tag" of the viewer (the text field at the top of the viewer which contains handy commands).

So. Time for another rewrite. Here's Ober-scala now.



It's two eclipse projects, one Java, and one Scala 2.8 (I'm having trouble with Java and Scala in the same project). To run it, just use the "Scala Ober" launcher that's in the scala project. There's a LOT of room for improvement, of course, but it functions, at least. On Linux. I haven't tested it on Windows. Sorry Windows :(. It's not that I think Windows sucks, it's just that I don't use it and it's pretty inconvenient for me to mess with it on my current setup.

Why did I do this? I wanted a "programmer's workbench" that was a combination program runner, simple editor, and shell. You know, like EMACS, but by Scala and for Scala. And the Oberon environment is very cool. When I read that Martin Odersky studied under Niklaus Wirth, I figured, hey, maybe some Scala people would be interested in this thing too. We'll see.

What can it do? If you righth-click a word, it will try to execute it as a command. At this point, there are 3 types of namespaces:

1. closure namespaces, which look up named closures
2. class namespaces, which look up classes
3. system namespaces, which look up shell commands

So, you can test it by right-clicking on some of the words that are already there when you start it (like New, Newcol, Del, Quit, ...). You can type in the name of a class in your class path and right-click on that (like tc.ober.Test, for instance); it will split the rest of the line by spaces and send the strings to the main method of the class. You can type in a shell command and right-click that; it will execute the word plus the rest of the line as a system command (using Runtime's exec(String) method).

What's left?

• execute .oberrc on startup
• Scala commands embedded in {...}
• file handling (crtl-click on a word and it opens as a file). See Wily for this behavior.
• meta commands for your .oberrc (commands to define commands, etc.)
• classpath manipulation
• fix bugs (like when you delete the last viewer in a track, it doesn't redraw)
  

Happy hacking!