Comment by magicmu

10 years ago

Thanks for this summary, I've been struggling for the last few minutes to try and figure out what the hell Oberon was. That sounds awesome!!

11 comments

magicmu

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atomatica  10 years ago

Yes, thanks for the concise summary.

The only thing I didn't understand is the part about garbage collection. What does garbage collection mean and what is the benefit in this implementation?

  • vezzy-fnord  10 years ago

    Programming language with automatic memory management. Look up "garbage collection" for all the details in the world.

    The reason I brought it up is because it's a common trope that you can't do low-level programming with GC, and systems like Oberon are direct evidence to the contrary.

    • nickpsecurity  10 years ago

      Exactly. I see the question on Stack Overflow all the time and just keep dropping a whole list of counterexamples. Too many myths in IT that hold mainstream back.

  • coldtea  10 years ago

    Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said?

    In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

    • rattray  10 years ago

      Actually, as a self-taught developer who started with Python and never had to learn about memory management, "garbage collection" was a concept I only became familiar with after a few years of reading gradually more & more material, usually from HN. The other stuff in the summary above would have either made sense or been "guessable" to 3-years-ago-me.

    • ghshephard  10 years ago

      Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection.

      I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago.

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