Self: the movie | Hacker News Reader

Self: the movie

smalltalk.org.br

Self the system still exists - this isn't just archeology. The website is at http://selflanguage.org and the Git sources at http://github.com/russellallen/self

The VM compiles on recent OS X and x86 Linux and it's pretty fun to play with. There is something about the underlying simplicity of the object model and the immediacy and concreteness of the system which makes programming in it for me unlike other programming languages, even after all this time.

I should do up a new release though - the downloadable binaries are a few years old now.

Was not sure what to expect when I first saw the title. It was a short documentary about the programming language Self highlighting some of its major features like modelessness and prototype based object oriented programming. The latter part was especially interesting to me because Javascript's OOP design was heavily influenced by Self. The prototype based system seems very powerful and much more flexible than traditional class based object oriented systems.

> Javascript's OOP design was heavily influenced by Self.

In roughly the same way Java's OOP design was heavily influenced by Smalltalk: take the basic idea, misunderstand it, forget to include most of what make it good then sprinkle some crap on top to make it worse.

Was not sure what to expect when I first saw the title.

I expected something along the lines of Erlang: The Movie. (I'm also surprised that there are still people who don't know about Self.)

Here it is on YouTube (Quicktime movie didn't have sound for me). Quality isn't as high, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774

Something funny happened to me when I went to that link. On the side panel, right near the top was a video titled "The Power of Smalltalk". I clicked that to see what it was about - it was about real "small talk", as in "chit chat" :)

AI ftw!

The Self implementation papers are some of the seminal contributions to modern high-speed VM design:

http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html#i...

David Ungar's dissertation, "The Design and Evaluation of a High Performance Smalltalk System" is also well-worth reading:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1986/CSD-86-287.p...

Why are consistent, simple, and clear languages like self and io (http://iolanguage.org/) so underused?

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