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There was a third window that many people tend to forget.

Mesa/Cedar, a interactive environment first done in Mesa, the Modula-2 predecessor and later on improved as Cedar, which was a system programing language with GC!

It was a working environment similar to Interlisp-D and Smalltalk, but using dynamic libraries, an interactive debugger, REPL and lots of nice goodies for an Algol like language. Back when at AT&T green phosphor terminals were being used.

Mesa was the inspiration for Lilith operating system done in Modula-2.

Similarly Cedar was the inspiration for Oberon and its derivatives.

Using Oberon felt to certain extent like Smalltalk, in a strong typed system programming language with a GC.

But Oberon based systems had the bad luck to appear at the same time the world was paying attention to Java and rise of VMs. So just like Plan9, only a few of us enjoyed using such environments.



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