I think Oberon doesn't have the community to thrive though. A language nowadays is much more than the core, it's also all the libraries, tooling and tutorials around it.

That said, Oberon probably makes a very fine teaching language.

Note that lots of Nim syntax and features were inspired by Wirth's languages including Oberon and Modula 3 (https://nim-lang.org/faq.html#what-have-been-the-major-influ...)

Modula, and then Modula 2, were languages primarily written by Wirth.

But Modula 3 was a project at DEC's SRC with Luca Cardelli as the primary author.

Both Modula 2 and 3 are worth looking at, and both are fully capable systems programming languages (ie. you can write an OS using them).

I still have a soft spot for Modula 2. Very nice language.

As a teen I learned Modula 2 before learning C. I bought a Modula 2 compiler for my Atari ST instead of a C compiler. In retrospect this may have been a mistake; the ST's OS was designed with C calling conventions in mind, with a lot of void casting, etc. All the documentation also implied this/ Using it from Modula 2 was a pain.

And then later when I learned C, I found many aspects very ... disturbing... after coming from the Wirth language world.

University of North Dakota replaced Pascal with Modula-2 for their CompSci classes starting in the Summer 1988 semester. It was taught on their IBM 370. I found Modula-2 to be great for some things, but its I/O was horrible. I don't think that was a function of the 370.

C is really primitive compared to Modula-2's modules. It just feels (and I guess is) hacked instead of a well thought out design.

Same here, strangely C++ provided a kind of welcome home to some of us.

Both C# and Java have had quite a few influences from Modula-3.

With all the latest C# 7.x and 8.0 improvements, it feels really close to what Modula-3 allowed for.

Python as well. The module system and the exception-handling system were mostly lifted from Modula-3, and the class/object system is a hybrid of Modula-3 and C++ (something that's still explicitly stated in Python's documentation to this day [0]).

If you first thought on reading that was "But Python's exception-handling system looks like everyone else's, how can it be lifted from this obscure language?", that's because everyone else lifted it from Modula-3 as well. That's right, C++ also borrowed Modula-3's system, and Java and C# built on top of that. Pretty much the whole mainstream concept of exception handling was invented by Modula-3.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html

Actually CLU and Mesa were the ones introducing exceptions. :)

However what many that bash Java's checked exceptions aren't aware of, is that they actually came from Modula-3. Not sure if this is what you mean.

Go is Oberon's and C's secret child. They met thanks to Robert Griesemer, who worked under Wirth's supervision, AFAIK, during his PhD.

I like how go gives access to the cool parts of Oberon within a relatively popular language.

This is true, but Rob Pike has his own independent connections to Oberon. Acme and other parts of Plan 9's mouse-driven UI were greatly "inspired" by the Oberon system.

Go is the secret child of Oberon-the-language and C. Before Go, Plan 9 was conceived as the secret child of Oberon-the-system and Unix.

That is more true of Inferno and Limbo than Plan 9.

What I like about Niklaus Wirth is that he stays true to his design philosophy and never sells out. Oberon is not a crowd-pleasing language.