[HN Gopher] The influence of Self
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The influence of Self
Author : mpweiher
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-11-07 08:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dubroy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dubroy.com)
| gumby wrote:
| Good article. Self was a research language; its output was papers
| and talks. Nobody ever tried to make it a "real" language in any
| sense. It's like Carl Hewett's development of Actors -- nobody
| tried to use his codebase other than him AFAIK, but the work was
| very influential.
|
| Honestly these experimental languages are crucial for science and
| better off being left alone. C++ has suffered in being both a
| research language and a production* language, and the people in
| the latter camp are frustrated by the people in the former camp.
|
| * I mean "production" in the sense of shipping code, not in the
| computer science sense.
| masklinn wrote:
| The weirdest part of self is how influential the runtime tech was
| compared to the langage.
|
| Javascript is it's most well known descendent and absolutely
| nothing like it, all the inheritance was clearly an
| implementation convenience rather than any sort of philosophical
| inspiration.
| munificent wrote:
| _> all the inheritance was clearly an implementation
| convenience rather than any sort of philosophical inspiration.
| _
|
| I don't believe that's true. Eich said: "I'm not proud, but I'm
| happy that I chose Scheme-ish first-class functions and Self-
| ish (albeit singular) prototypes as the main ingredients." [1]
|
| It doesn't _look_ like philosophical inspiration because Eich
| was told to make the language 's syntax resemble Java. But as I
| understand it, it was a very deliberate choice on Eich's part.
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/@_benaston/lesson-1a-the-history-of-
| javas...
| munificent wrote:
| _> Lars Bak was of course hired by Google to build V8, which was
| released in 2008. Within a few years, most of the techniques
| pioneered in Self had made their way into the major JS engines._
|
| Sort of coming full circle: After working on V8 for many years,
| Lars pitched Google on the idea to build a new language and VM.
| They felt they'd started to hit the wall with how fast they could
| make V8 because of JavaScript's fundamentally mutable nature.
|
| That became Dart and one of the reasons they believed the Dart VM
| would significantly outperform JS VMs was because even though
| Dart 1.0 was essentially dynamically typed, it was class-based,
| and the inheritance hierarchy and field set of each class are
| fixed. Therefore, you don't need all of the clever "hidden class"
| optimization tricks they invented way back then.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Some of the Danish people behind V8 and Dart are now working on
| the impressive Toit language for embedded IoT:
|
| https://github.com/toitlang
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Organizing Programs Without Classes (1991) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26888479 - April 2021 (6
| comments)
|
| _Self - Fun Through Simplicity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24329910 - Aug 2020 (9
| comments)
|
| _Call with David Ungar (2015) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23800625 - July 2020 (4
| comments)
|
| _Organizing Programs Without Classes (1991) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120836 - Jan 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Environment and the programming language Self, part 4_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782896 - Aug 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _Self Programming Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496570 - July 2019 (40
| comments)
|
| _New release of Self programming language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409088 - May 2017 (37
| comments)
|
| _Morphic: The Self User Interface Framework_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9858651 - July 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _David Ungar: Seven Paradoxes of Object-Oriented Programming
| Languages_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555710 - May
| 2015 (2 comments)
|
| _New release of Self programming language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7047953 - Jan 2014 (42
| comments)
|
| _The status of the Self language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957511 - Dec 2010 (23
| comments)
|
| _Self language still alive - new release for Linux, Mac_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520246 - July 2010 (8
| comments)
|
| _Dave Ungar at Stanford U: Self language creator on its history
| and influence_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091916 -
| Feb 2010 (1 comment)
|
| _Self: The Power of Simplicity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771222 - Aug 2009 (8
| comments)
|
| Really not that much. Others?
| pvg wrote:
| There's probably a lot more in the 'influence on JVM things'
| side but it's pretty hard to search. There's also stuff like
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481339
|
| Interestingly, you're the one and only person who has posted a
| url mentioned in the footnote of the current submission:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188325
|
| At the time, it looks you were also (give or take) the one and
| only person who cared.
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