[M3devel] Modula-3 questions

[penn43 at gmx.com]

Dear Modula-3 developers,

I am not a Modula-3 user, but I am considering becoming one. I have already had a look at the language, and it certainly looks interesting. However, I still have some misgivings about starting learning Modula-3, since it would be a considerable time investment and I am not even sure if Modula-3 is the right tool for me.
I hope you can help me clarify some points and dispel some doubts.

The first point is that I would neither be working on large projects, nor doing systems programming. I understand these were the two major strengths of Modula-3, but neither would be useful in my case, as I would be programming mostly small- and medium-sized applications, not even industrial-level. What I need is simply a tool that can be used instead of C++ and Java. Modula-3 looks fine, because it promises to be simple. However, having read that Modula-3 was designed especially for industrial-strength and advanced uses, I am afraid that adopting Modula-3 as my development tool might be an overkill. Could you advise me in this regard?

Secondly, could you please help me understand what are the reasons for which one may prefer Modula-3 over Oberon-2/Active Oberon? I have been considering Oberon too because, like Modula-3, it promises to be simple and minimalistic.
So, again, keeping in mind that I don't need the advanced features mentioned above, nor multithreading, does it make any sense for me to choose Modula-3 instead of Oberon, or Object Pascal?

Lastly, what is the current availability of Modula-3 libraries? I have read that Modula-3 has a rich set of libraries, but that was many years ago. Are there any up-to-date libraries, fulfilling today's needs? I am mostly interested in GUI support (possibly bindings to some standard GUI toolkit, like GTK or QT, or wxWidgets), internet libraries and UTF-8 support.

I thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Marresh

P.S. is the creation and maintenance of module interfaces all that trouble? I read somewhere that it is a pain, and that the inconvenience of it would only be paid off when one has to manage large projects (which is not my case).