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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

Haha ... funny to read about people scratching their head over Self. I feel like once you've wrapped your head around the Squeak version of Smalltalk, your about 50% of the way towards understanding Self. It's not a language the way we think of it, with CLI tools and syntax and text editors. It is a mutable environment of programmable objects. Sure there's some writing inside of objects to create methods, but you're not gonna find a "try this in the browser" code.

Self is/was http://noflojs.org/ 's grandfather.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE

I would also argue that Self is to programming languages what Haiku is to OS development. No on is writing a web framework in self, it's more of a toy and a neat artifact of where programming has been and could go in the future.

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Smalltalk is still class based. The only strong connection between Self and Squeak is Morphic.

I stand corrected :)

Much of the syntax is similar too:

  (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ Transcript show: 'Yay!' ] "Squeak"
  (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ 'Yay!' printLine ] "Self"

C and Java also have a similar syntax.

Most of the Self people were Smalltalk people before, so you could see Self as being heavily inspired by Smalltalk in its syntax and image-based persistence. However Squeak is still Smalltalk while Self is a full successor language (you could say Morphic was backported from Self back to Smalltalk).

I feel like my personal challenges coming to understand Self are often exaggerated by Morphic. Most of the linguistic notions I gather from reading papers aren't too tough, but I always bounce off when trying to translate that to effects in the Self environment.

I encounter that too. I started writing Self code in a text editor and loading it in the REPL. Some of the code shipped with Self is like this (The Mango parser code for example).

Once I was more familiar I started learning the GUI environment. It took me a while to work out how the object transporter worked to export code back to text files but once I got that Self became a lot more friendly to use.

See, I'd love to do that but I don't think the documentation ever bothers to explain it.

A.K.A. UI poorly solved usability challenges.

In a way, the fundamentals of Self is the future of programming but we need to get designers helping with the UI/UX

Smalltalk has a similar challenge

There is actually a basic web server example. It includes a web based object browser. I'm not sure if it's in the 4.5.0 release but it's one of the branches IIRC.

They mean you won't find something like http://tryruby.org

It is done for Smalltalk. Why not for Self?

http://amber-lang.net/

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