Self-interest December 2000

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

18 participants
19 discussions

Blocks: Summary
by Dru Nelson 12 Jan '01

12 Jan '01

Thanks Jecel for the great Summary. The trick I was looking for was the read barrier when using blocks. Whenever they are about to be used as an argument for a message send, the 'push' instruction will bind a newly cloned block proto to the current method context (activation record). I was looking for something less expensive :) Dru Nelson San Mateo, California

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Re: [self-interest] Why did Sun stop development of Self ?
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 29 Dec '00

29 Dec '00

Thilo, the short answer is: to focus on Java. Note that Sun also killed TCL and Spring OS at that time (the latter to focus on Solaris). I can only offer you an outsider's view, but it is interesting to compare what Java and Self were in 1995. Java was small and there were many missing pieces, but a killer application has just appeared that could take advantage of its modular nature: platform independent applications for the web. Self was large and monolithic, but flexible and feature packed. It probably seemed easier to grow Java as needed than to slim down Self. -- Jecel

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Why did Sun stop development of Self ?
by Thilo Schwidurski 28 Dec '00

28 Dec '00

Hi everybody, about a couple of weeks ago I started reading papers about Self. I got very excited about the classless OO paradigma behind Self. Now I ask myself why the development stopped, at least officially as a Sun project - so it seems to me. I did'nt find an answer on the sun pages. The list of members of this egroup (and of course postings) shows that there are a lot of people that have been involved in the development of the language at sun. Do you have an answer to this question ? Regards and the best wishes for the new year ! Thilo.

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Re: [self-interest] a query
by Thierry Deval 28 Dec '00

28 Dec '00

Hello David, Having no Sun to work with, but being a lucky PowerBook user, I'm really eager to have a hand on a useable Mac version. You're talking about a Carbon port. Would it really run under MacOS-X ? That would be great, as I only work with that (Mail, Network Admin, Web browsing, and of course programming ;-) Best wishes to you and all the selfers, Thierry On Thursday, December 28, 2000, at 12:02 AM, David Ungar wrote: > Dear Self-ers, > > Various distractions have kept me from getting the Carbon port onto > the Self Web site, even though it's been done for a while. And > lately, I have sped up the outliner update cycle and turned off > button flashing; the net effect is to make the Mac version much more > responsive. > > But getting especially the latter changes out will take time and take > me away from my research, so I would like to know how much interest > there is out there for these changes. In other words, how urgent is > the need for them? In other other words, how many of you would > actually use and benefit from these? If there are enough positive > replies, I should be inspired to get them out sooner. > > I have using Self to do my main programming and though it may be > immodest, I have to report that it is a blast. Particularly when > debugging, I feel much more productive. > > Happy new year to you all! > > - Dave > -- > > > David Ungar > Sun Microsystems Laboratories > (650) 336-2618 > > > > >

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a query
by David Ungar 28 Dec '00

28 Dec '00

Dear Self-ers, Various distractions have kept me from getting the Carbon port onto the Self Web site, even though it's been done for a while. And lately, I have sped up the outliner update cycle and turned off button flashing; the net effect is to make the Mac version much more responsive. But getting especially the latter changes out will take time and take me away from my research, so I would like to know how much interest there is out there for these changes. In other words, how urgent is the need for them? In other other words, how many of you would actually use and benefit from these? If there are enough positive replies, I should be inspired to get them out sooner. I have using Self to do my main programming and though it may be immodest, I have to report that it is a blast. Particularly when debugging, I feel much more productive. Happy new year to you all! - Dave -- David Ungar Sun Microsystems Laboratories (650) 336-2618

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Haikus
by cramakrishnan＠acm.org 22 Dec '00

22 Dec '00

Had a meeting today to convince a client, in not so many words, that their way of doing things is bad and the way we suggest is better. To relax before the meeting, I wrote some haikus. Here are a few: Why is my program Not working? The code looks good. Classpaths confuse me. Self: Simplicity Removes boundaries, confusion. Makes thoughts become code. No class, just object. Elegance is the halmark Of great ideas. Happy holidays. - sekhar -- C. Ramakrishnan cramakrishnan(a)acm.org

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patterns and Self
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 15 Dec '00

15 Dec '00

As promissed, here are some quick comments from a Self programmer's viewpoint on the patterns in the "Design Patterns" book by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. The numbers in parenthesis are the page numbers where each pattern is described. I hope this helps, -- Jecel Creational Patterns -------------- ===> Abstract Factory(87): I have suggested that it might be interesting to add abstract types to Self in the form of interface (to use Java terms) objects. This would be a good use of this pattern. Instead of writing a: list copyRemoveAll which refers to a specific prototype (list) directly, we could have a: interfaces sequence getOneFor: 'fifo' Of course, with dynamic types this pattern is considerably simpler in Self than in the book. I can't think of an example where this is used in Self 4.1.2. ===> Builder(97): This goes against the idea of creating new objects by simply cloning an existing one. Of course, sometimes cloning is anything but simple. See the copy method for morphs, for example. But it is probably better to stick with the current Self style of stuffing all the complexity in the 'copy' method instead of creating separate "builder" objects. ===> Factory Method(107): It is hard to see what the fuss is all about when you have dynamic types and cloning. Just put a prototype of the "concreteProduct" in a slot in the prototype of the "concreteCreator" and patch the copy method to go down one level, here. See the low level graphical framework in Self (canvas, windows, graphics contexts...) for an example. No big deal. ===> Prototype(117): This *is* a prototype based language. You can't avoid using this pattern if you want to! No big deal. ===> Singleton(127): All objects in Self are singleton unless they have traits clonable (or some suitable replacement) as one of their ancestors. No big deal. Structural Patterns -------------- ===> Adaptor(139): This is *so* much simpler with implicit, dynamic delegation (data parents). When wrapping an objects with many methods, you only have to worry about the ones you will need to change, not about all of them. And Self really makes this pattern more powerful by allowing you to override data slots as well as method slots (even better: you can override a data slot with a method slot and vice versa). The only thing to watch out is how to handle copying and how to avoid having the adapted object's identity "leak out". Reflection might help with these problems. I don't know of any examples in Self 4.1.2. ===> Bridge(151): You could use implicit delegation for this pattern, but the example in Self (canvas) uses explicit delegation instead. ===> Composite(163): Morphs are a great example of this. I am not sure that any Self features help very much, here, other than having dynamic typing make what objects can be plugged into what others more flexible. ===> Decorator(175): It would be more pleasing, in my opinion, to use data parents (implicit delegation) for this pattern. I don't know of any examples where it is used in Self 4.1.2. ===> Facade(185): I don't think Self makes this pattern simpler than in other languages. I was going to say that 'desktop' could be an example of this, but that is pushing it a little.... ===> Flyweight(195): I would say that Self's advanced inlining compiler technology makes this pattern less necessary than in other systems. This pattern is also used as a classic example of the advantages of reflective systems (see the Open Implementation pages). http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/oi/workshop-94/foil/main.html Oddly enough, there are examples of this in Morphic. There are several cases where the strategy pattern should have been used but the information was represented as simple integers instead (see alignLeft, alignCenter and alignRight in columnMorph and similar options in related morphs). This is a design bug - I think the flyweight pattern should never be used in Self. ===> Proxy(207): Exactly the same comment as for Adaptor. Except that there are plenty example of this in objects named, oddly enough, "proxies". Behavioral Patterns --------------- ===> Chain of Responsibility(223): The event handling in the user interface partly uses this pattern. Having implicit delegation might be nice, but I am not sure it would make much of a difference, here. ===> Command(233): Event objects in the user interface could be considered an example of this. I think that this is nicer to do in Self since making lots of objects that are a little different isn't as bad as when you have to create a different class for each one. ===> Interpreter(243): The only example that comes to mind is tinySelf 1. While the Self language itself doesn't make this pattern much simpler, being able to develop and interpreter in a dynamic user environment really helps. I think that most cases where this pattern might be used could be better implemented as a parser generated by Mango instead. ===> Iterator(257): As Smalltalk Stream classes show, this pattern is much easier to implement in dynamically typed languages. I don't know of any examples in Self 4.1.2 and sometimes miss them a lot. My students implemented iterators for matrix objects (for an unfinished 3D GUI project) and that made a lot of the higher level code considerably simpler. Iterators are important in languages like Self and Smalltalk that have a very awkward syntax for accessing vector elements. ===> Mediator(273): Hmmm... I am not sure, but the damage/redraw logic distributed between morphs and the worldMorph might be considered an example of this. I don't see that Self is particularly helpful in this case. ===> Memento(283): Don't you just pity the poor slobs who have to program with systems that can't save Snapshots? :-) You don't need this pattern with Snapshots, but in Self we do have it in the form of the Transporter. It would be nice to replace these two great tools with a real persistent object store. ===> Observer(293): I would say that the damage/redraw code also includes an example of this pattern. Self doesn't help with this either, but a reflective layer might. ===> State(305): Who needs this when you can have data parents? See the various tree objects in Self 4.1.2 as an example of why we can live without this (or as an example of how to implement this with implicit delegation, depending on your viewpoint). ===> Strategy(315): This can also be implemented as data parents, but I have used explicit delegation in my own programs instead. In the latter case Self doesn't bring much to the party. ===> Template Method(325): This is used in many places in Self, including in the C++ implementation of the virtual machine. For some reason I tend to think of the Beta language when I look at this pattern, but it is easy in Self as well. ===> Visitor(331): I can't think of any examples of this in Self, though some of the runtime code generated by Mango might qualify.

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cognitive processes
by Albertina Lourenci 14 Dec '00

14 Dec '00

Hi Selfers: I have taken the liberty to resend part of Jecel's message to the Self list because I think it is fundamental for computer scientists to understand how artists think. > É que eu tento ser sempre gentil, certo? Eu disse que você deveria > > reconsiderar se realmente entendeu todos aqueles papers de programação > > orientada a objetos. > > Translating: I try to be always gentle, OK? Indeed you are one of the most polite, detached person I have ever met. You let one "be"!! I said you should reconsider if you really understood those papers about OO programming. > > Quais papers? Which papers? Honestly this kind of analysis I cannot even read. What's wrong here? I do not know because I am able to follow detailed papers like those written by Luca Cardelli or the above written by Ole Agesen. Indeed Randy also called my attention graceffully about my impressions on Ole Agesen's paper! Of course I have not understood the way you do. I thank you for the explanation.But what matters is that it touched the core of the incongruencies I was having with the Beta Language and motivated me to study Self! The learned lesson from this paper was my change to Self! What's wrong with this? > Acho que estou entendendo tao bem que os papers que > estou pegando simplesmente reforcam as minhas ideias, como o do > Amnon que critica claramente a metodologia do Bosch. Albertina: I think I am understanding so well that the papers I am reading simply enhance my own ideas, like that from Amnon Giving the Quality a Name JOOP June 1998 where he criticizes Bosch's methodology. Você tem uma tendencia de ouvir o que você está pensando, e não o que as pessoas estão falando. Isto também vale para papers que você lê, de modo que quase qualquer coisa vai reforçar suas idéias. Eu estava tentando alertar você para tomar cuidado com isso. Jecel: You have a trend to listen to what you are thinking, and not what people are talking! This also holds for the papers you read, so almost anything will enhance your ideas. I was trying to warn you to be careful. I know you are an excellent listener! While I am with people I talk too much. I always hear my inner voice. Abstract painters like Kandinsky specially taught one to do so. Curiously I love Kandinsky and Klee, they are part of my inner self. I had studied them for two months this years. Curiously I was reading the book The rethorics of purity. The author criticizes Kandinsky and Mondrian severely. I love Klee, Mondrian and Kandinsky above all. Yet although he does not grasp what is best in those painters I realized his criticism was proper. Then in my post-doctorate report I emphasized especially Robert Rauschenberg who is the opposite of Kandinsky. He gathered garbage on the streets of New York to accomplish his work. Certainly Kandinsky would never do this. He is concerned with the divine. Since dadaists and so on want to smash Kandinsky's lightness, I only selected one of his pictures to show that he opened the way to organic trends in architecture. Of course the last part of Kandinsky's pictures were not analysed by this critic of art. Then in this case I would say he is doing exactly what Jecel thinks I do. So to be faithful to Kandinsky I rather continued his trends through Jack Sarfatti's post-quantum mechanics (Kandinsky introduced abstract painting inspired by the breakthrough in physics) and studied Leibniz to show the Maurits C. Escher's glory! Escher like Theo van Doesburg and Mondrian may be considered artists that contributed most to the development of free form. Sorry the critic above could only view they were man-oriented, did not care about the feminine and so on. He is right! I realized through him how much anti-feminine I am. How much I suffered being this way. Now an example of Kandinsky's way of thinking. Yet mimicking Escher's ideas I had to go beyond him. I mean Escher did not apply the subgroup relationships within the plane crystallographic groups to transform one form into the other. (metamorphosis). To reach the essence of the free plan I had to. So it dawned on me I should study lattice theory. I did! and I was successful to accomplish the task I was engaged. I had to write the post-doctorate report who is being analysed by a mathematician. My supervisor from University of Brasilia told me that lattice theory had nothing to do with what I was doing. I told him. No, reading lattice theory I was able to unfold my ideas. So I will state this is important. Then I found a passage where Aristotle explained the cognitive process involved in the reasoning I unfolded. But suddenly it dawned on Norai I might be right! He asked a colleague in Germany about my hypothesis. They concluded that indeed it could be proved that was harder to deal with non-normal subgroups due to the existence of an anti-isomorphism, while normal subgroups the transition of forms was smooth!!!! Now coming back to OO programming: As I told Peter Wegner at ECOOP'97, although I appreciate his papers, there is something heavy about them. But right now I am reading Models and Paradigms of Interaction from him in LNCS 791. I am loving it because he states technically the reasons why I kept changing from one language to another. Wonderful his criticism on functional languages!!!! I am delighted to perceive that a computer scientist noticed the real meaning of interaction!!! However I cannot understand how he argues so beautifully and yet does not program in Self, the queen- language in interaction! The difference between you (Selfers and I ): I just need to express my ideas in a language that is similar to my architectural ideas. I master my architectural ideas. I know how Alexander influenced me to reach the final conclusions about how a free plan should be. This tunes with the reasoning followed by Amnon Eden JOOP June 1998 to write his beautiful paper : Giving "The quality" a Name. Thanks for the opportunity to tell you this. This is fundamental to my inner development. Albertina -- .----------------------------------------------------------. | Albertina Lourenci | | PhD in Architecture and Urbanism | | post-doctorate researcher | | Laboratory of Integrated Systems University of Sao Paulo | | Avenida Professor Luciano Gualberto, 158 Travessa 3 | | CEP: 05508-900 | | Sao Paulo Sao Paulo State Brazil | | Voice: +55 011 818 5254 | | Fax: +55 11 211 4574 | .----------------------------------------------------------.

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Self for Linux
by Maximilian Thiel 07 Dec '00

07 Dec '00

Hello, as you probably know, the company Daedalos Consulting GmbH has tried - in cooperation with Gordon Cichon - to port Self 4.0 to Linux. Unfortunatly the project was stopped after a while mainly because we didn't have had enough ressources (man-power) to complete the task. In cooperation with a collegue I will take up this project and force it during the next few weeks. In order to get an impression I will introduce my collegue and myself: Last june I completed my degree in computer science with maths . Up until the end of October I was employed by the University of Freiburg (Germany) as a developer in the area of Robotic and Artificial Intelligence. As a member of the successfull CS-Freiburg-team, who won the world-championship of robotsoccer last August in Melbourne-Australia, I was responsible for graphiccard-programming and image-processing, using C++ under RT-Linux. I have also a good knowledge of MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) programming, but no experience in Assembler-programming under Linux. My collegue Thomas Franken worked for Daedalos since 1996 as a specialist for smalltalk-programming. He has a good knowledge of compiler-development and codegeneration, but no experience and knowledge concerning the structure of the Smalltalk VM. In all probability we are involved with the realization of this task from the beginning of december 2000 until the end of march 2001. We have downloaded the source of Self 4.1.2 from the web site www.sun.com/research/self. Similar to the sparc-version (svr4) of Self we created subdirectories for Linux and i386 on the appropriate places (we've cloned the sparc-processor specific code from src/svr4 to src/i386). After some modification on Makefiles we were able to create the Dependencie and the incl/_*.incl-files in the subdirectory Linux/generated. Then we tried to compile the Linux/optimized version but we've got a lot of fancy messages. Now we want to address to you hoping that someone of you could give us some advice concerning the following topics: - Assembler-Programming on the Sparc-Architecture (we `ve already ordered the following book: SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language Programming, & C written by Richard Paul) - Assembler-Programming under Linux, e.g. signal handling (as you can see above we have good knowledge in Assembler-programming under Windows and C++-Programming under Linux) - a good overview of the structure of the vm-source-code. We are using the Linux-Kernel-Version 2.2.16 Please contact us under: Maximilian.Thiel(a)daedalos.com Or Thomas.Franken(a)daedalos.com Sincerly, Thomas & Maximilian Good Self-Confidence! --------------------------------------------------- Self-Contact@Daedalos: Daedalos Consulting GmbH Ruhrtal 5 58456 Witten Deutschland Tel: +49 x2302 9790 Fax: +49 x2302 979199 E-Mail: Maximilian.Thiel(a)daedalos.com Thomas.Franken(a)daedalos.com Web-Site: http://www.daedalos.com

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partial conclusions about design patterns
by Albertina Lourenci 06 Dec '00

06 Dec '00

Hi Selfers: I found a very interesting paper about design patterns entitled Giving the Quality a Name JOOP june 1998 from Amnon H.Eden. The following quoted passage tunes with my general impressions about the subject. A "quality without a name"? "In contrast to the search for a precise specification language, trends within the patterns community do not see favorably the attempts to subject design patterns to scientific analysis. This school of thought holds a reactionary view of patterns that adheres to the pattern concept as originally conceived by Alexander. According to this view, a pattern is an idea, an element of a language, and a quasi-corporeal concept whose essence is intangible, elusive, and hence beyond the scope of a literal expression. A "good" pattern departs from mere microarchitectural prescription by some immaterial quality that cannot be explicitly expresse, a "quality without a name" and therefore cannot be interpreted outside its context or taken apart. Therefore, going meta, as the reflexive treatmeent of design patterns that follow the analytic traditions's course of action is connoted, is meaningless. Others do not treat patterns as sacred cows (like me). The rational school considers the actual and potential contribution of design patterns too valuable for them to be referred to as heavenly bodies. Much benefit can be gained from an analytic approach, namely, by "dissecting" the proposed solutions and reducing them to building blocks of higher resolution. thereby allowing systematic reconstruction of new design patterns, formal treatment of their relationships, and tools that support their application." . He sees an interesting paper like the one by Bosch that attempted a more precise means of design pattern specification, such as dedicated programming languages or extensions to existing OOP languages or by mandating constrainsts on their implementation as an attempt to capture the abstractions behind all possible conforming implementations. Amnon distinguishes these underlying abstractions of the solutions from the remaining designations of the term design patterns and call them lattices. He creates a language called LePUS which is a small subset of higher order monadic logic with natural graphic representation, which abstracts singular specifications as atomic relations and entities in a logic model ...and so on (page 11) Günther Kniesel tries to identify meta patterns and identifies delegation as the best generic mechanism to implement some of the patterns. Jecel and Dave seems to state that all the abstractions captured by the design patterns can be implemented perfectly well in Self. As a model designer, no expert will deny that my ecodesign models all aspects in the act of designing architectural objects and the relationship with the environment hence implying in urban design and further urban and regional planning. Moreover I had to translate this into a geometric modeling. I did this through the symmetry groups of the plane and the dotless planes + tilings + the subgroup relationships among crystallographic groups and so on.The variant of the tiling is due to the contribution of the graphic artist Maurits C.Escher. Indeed to deal with the symmetry groups the way I did is all based on Escher's imagery. Earlier PhD in mathematics stated they were pure phantasies. Now thanks to the yugoslavian mathematician Jablan not only can I classify all Escher's "phanatasies" but also Jablan made me aware primitive people ten thousand years before Christ knew all these symmetry groups!!!!!!!! I am an artist and I follow a scientific approach to my research! Computer scientists say they are scientists and are obviously behaving as if they were artists of a certain trend...I mean, abstract art gave origin to several paintings belonging to different artists. We find in the literature many methods, many abstraction mechanisms, too many things and the poor person from the applied areas, interested like me to save Mother Earth from collapse finds huge hurdles to implement a serious research that will increase dramatically the quality of life on earth. Indeed I think Self is the language that tunes with the hermeneutic nature of my ecodesign model. It has an advanced user interface. An architect does nothing with words, only with forms!!!!!It has Kansas, It is becoming portable to many platforms even PC! And I cannot implement my ecodesign model if an expressive language like Self is not available. I am awaiting this porting to PC!! Since the most powerful related work to my ecodesign model is Alexander's A pattern language, and I was going to work under his advising to exchange ideas (1990-1992) it is quite natural I feel inclined to scientifically examine his proposals and the GOF patterns. When I ask for help, it is because I have to persuade computer scientists that Self is an intelligent option. I think comnputer scientists should be aware of everything that is going on in the world and know what is more evolved. Of course since they behave rather like artists they have very little discernment. Who loses? Mankind of course!!! Albertina .----------------------------------------------------------. | Albertina Lourenci | | PhD in Architecture and Urbanism | | post-doctorate researcher | | Laboratory of Integrated Systems University of Sao Paulo | | Avenida Professor Luciano Gualberto, 158 Travessa 3 | | CEP: 05508-900 | | Sao Paulo Sao Paulo State Brazil | | Voice: +55 011 818 5254 | | Fax: +55 11 211 4574 | .----------------------------------------------------------.

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Self-interest December 2000