I dont exactly remember who said it, perhaps Andrei Alexandrescu, that only a few other than Nicholas Wirth epitomizes this drive to perfect something with a persistent passion. Throwing away valiant efforts and starting from the beginning again and again. He designed Algol(W), Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon..Oberon-2. I know none of these languages enough to know how much their feature sets overlap, but it indeed seems exceptional
Algol(W) comes from the messy world of Algol standardization, has its tails in the early days of mainframe programming, before structured programming was fully crystallized, and the modern epoch.
Pascal is a clean up of the early Algol efforts, with committee-designs removed for the service of CS students. What remained is an excellent academic language that increasingly had to bow to industry pressures to be "C-like". Original Pascal was compiled to byte-code, often interpreted, but by the 80s many Pascals had inline assembly language extensions, OS-specific hooks and other artifacts of systems programming.
Modula is a much as Wirth's as type-theorists who really created its foundations, it's far bigger than a one man effort. Modula also saw tremendous funding & industry support, until it was "eclipsed" by Ada.
Oberon is the Scheme-sized Algol dialect. It's a tiny little programming language, with its own tiny graphical operating system, tiny compiler, etc. Closest thing to an "AlgolM" (I'm sure he took more than a hint from the Lisp school.) Oberon is his meditation on the sublime .. something for future generations. I would love to see an Oberon Laptop Per Child.
Re OLPC: The Ceres computers built at ETH by N. Wirth between 1985 and 1990 came close. They weren't laptops, but had been designed from the ground up (i.e. hardware, operating system, programming language) to be fully understandable and teachable. The OS was booted from ROM and took only a few seconds to show up on the screen. Project Oberon was documented in the book http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/ProjectOberon.pd...
If you're a fan of Niklaus Wirth, I recommend The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity, a book of essays by Wirth's colleagues and students about some of his work.
Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input from the Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus some ideas from languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo (concurrency). However, it is a new language across the board. In every respect the language was designed by thinking about what programmers do and how to make programming, at least the kind of programming we do, more effective, which means more fun. "
source: http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html
Maybe you want to try the lightweight Windows-GUI-IDE "BlackBox Component Builder" by Oberon microsystems AG, Zurich (Switzerland), based on "Component Pascal" (AFAIK an improved Oberon-2 descendant). Latest downloadable version is 1.6RC6 see http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html
If you want to play with the current version, try: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/downloads/index I am fascinated with languages old and new and might well give this one a shot just to see what is going on. Note that the above is current, not 1996...
To build native Windows applications in Oberon 2 (later extended and renamed to Component Pascal) check the free and open source BlackBox IDE and runtime environment developed by Oberon microsystems http://oberon.ch/blackbox.html#Free_Download
