This gbeta tutorial is designed to teach — wait for it — gbeta! gbeta is a programming in the old-school nordic tradition of Simula, based on BETA, developed as a PhD project by Erik Ernst at Århus University. The tutorial is an attempt to teach gbeta to readers unfamiliar with the ideas inherited from BETA. The only prerequisite should be a basic understanding of OO programming.

For more information about gbeta and its implementation, please take a look at the web site:

This project is not meant to explain how to install gbeta, or BETA for that matter, but rather explain to the uninitiated, the basic concepts that govern gbeta, and demonstrate how to use them.

This tutorial is made with Jekyll with additional plugins (can be found in the _plugins folder)

First of all an extended version of RedCloth is used, adding in the ability to write:

gbprog. hello.gb

and the converter will look for the file hello.gb in /tutorial/gbsrc/ and insert its contents.

Feedback and contributions to this work are highly appreciated, although one should keep in mind that the author(s) will be learning the language while writing this tutorial. As such, new additions to this manual may be reverted or modified if the other authors find it incomprehensible or unclear.

This project is also about establishing a discussion on how to teach new OO programming concepts to new students.

Since these files are under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, the source files are made available to you per the terms of that copyright. For more information refer to the file COPYING, which you should have received as part of this package; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

This project is hosted under git, on github:

with read write access, so there’s no stopping you from cloning orpushing anything from/to it. Enjoy!