Oberon was my first programming language, taught by Jürg Gutknecht himself. One week, our home assignmend was "write your own file system". At first, I thought that would be impossible to do in such a short time. However, it turned out to be not that hard thanks to the clean and simple design of the Oberon operating system.
Some of them changed universities explicitly because programming was taught with Oberon. They don't wanted to waste time with a language that wouldn't give them a good job after university.
At the university where I did my first degree, we learned Java, C/C++ and PHP. Back in the days I thought this was a good thing, because I could use this knowledge directly at work.
But at the second university I got an introduction to SmallTalk, which blew my mind. Now I know the value of looking into alternative programming languages once in a while.
I got to learn it while at university in Lisbon, when looking into stuff for compiler design.
As I refer on a sibling post, it opened my mind to systems programming with GC enabled languages, specially interesting when one thinks how the desktop computers looked in the mid-90's.
A decade later I got to enjoy a talk from Niklaus and Jürg at CERN, but Oberon was already on the way out.
