Acme was definitely inspired by Oberon the system. I visited ETH a number of times in the '80s and there were some properties of Oberon I found attractive. Acme definitely grew out of thinking I did there, but of course it was not tied to any language (unlike Oberon or an IDE), but rather integrated the Plan 9 command environment. Also, the button 3 context-getting thing was completely new, and when I spoke at ETH later about Acme, Wirth singled out that feature as something of interest. Sam predates all that. -rob On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 5:35 AM Christopher Browne wrote: > On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 at 05:00, Rob Pike wrote: > >> My general mood about the current standard way of nerd working is how >> unimaginative and old-fashioned it feels. There are countless ways we could >> be interacting with our terminals, editors, and shells while we program, >> but for various sociological and historical reasons we're pretty much using >> one from decades ago. I'm sure it's productive for almost everyone, but it >> seems dull to me. We could be doing something much more dynamic. I mean, >> xterm is hardly more sophisticated than the lame terminal code that ran in >> mpx (ca. 1982), other than colors and cursor addressing, which date from >> the 1960s via early PCs. IDEs don't sing to me, although they are powerful, >> because they don't integrate well with the environment, only with the >> language. And they are just lots of features, not a coherent vision. No >> model to speak of. >> >> Compare what happened with our shell windows with what happened with our >> "smart" phones in the last 20 years and you'll get some inkling of what I >> think we're missing. It's not that we should program the way we use >> iPhones, but that there are fields where user interface work has made a >> real different recently. Not so in programming, though. We're missing out. >> >> But I'm a grumpy old man and getting far off topic. Warren should cry, >> "enough!". >> > > I recently saw indication that the UI for Sam and Acme were inspired by > Oberon. (And per url [1] below, Rob Pike is quoted, sort of...) > > I'd be interested (and I think that's a TUHS thing ;-) ) in hearing some > elaboration on that. All that is said is that "Rob was blown away" and > that this "influenced" Sam/Acme; is there some further explanation of that > worth pointing at? (Or are some Oberon fans putting words in mouths? ;-) ) > > [1] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2011/006245.html > -- > When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the > question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" >