Self-interest August 2021

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

10 participants
4 discussions

UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - Wednesday 28th July 2021
by Giovanni Corriga 30 Aug '21

30 Aug '21

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, July 30th. Russell Allen will talk to us about Self ( https://selflanguage.org/ ). Dating back to the late 1980s, Self is a prototype based programming language and environment in the broader Smalltalk family. Although Self has always been a niche research system, its influence can still be seen in areas as diverse as the fast VMs of Java and Javascript, in the prototype semantics of Javascript, and in the Morphic user interface used by Squeak, Pharo and Cuis. Russell Allen ( https://twitter.com/russell_allen_ ) has a background in law and computers and first came across Self in the late 1990s. Around 2008 he helped get Self running on Linux x86, set up the Self website and GitHub account, and for the last decade or so he has been helping keep Self as a project alive. In this talk, Russell will demonstrate Self as a running system, including the object semantics, language, and the multi-user Morphic development environment. He’ll talk about the current status of the project and the challenges it faces for the future. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. Please note that the meeting will start later than usual, to accommodate the speaker who will connect from Australia. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/UKSTUG/events/cbklbrycckblc/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

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UK Smalltalk User Group Meeting - Wednesday, August 25th
by Giovanni Corriga 16 Aug '21

16 Aug '21

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, August 25th. Marcus Denker will talk about Variables in Pharo. We like to say that “Everything is an Object” in Smalltalk. This is true in many cases: Classes, methods, even the execution stack are reflectively available as objects. This talk shows how this idea can be extended to Variables and how Pharo implements first-class Variables for Globals, instance Variables, Class Variables, and even temporary variables. This presentation explores the Variable hierarchy, shows how variables simplify the compiler and how the reflective API provided by variables is used by the debugger. In a hands-on tutorial, we extend the language by defining new kinds of Variables. Marcus ( https://marcusdenker.de/ ) is a permanent researcher at INRIA Lille - Nord Europe ( http://www.inria.fr/lille/ ). Before, he was a postdoc at the PLEIAD lab/DCC University of Chile and the Software Composition Group, University of Bern. His research focuses on reflection and meta-programming for dynamic languages. Marcus Denker received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bern/Switzerland in 2008 and a Dipl.-Inform. (MSc) from the University of Karlsruhe/Germany in 2004. He co-founded Zweidenker GmbH ( https://zweidenker.de/ ) in 2009. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/UKSTUG/events/cbklbrycclbhc/ ) to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

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goals for Self
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 11 Aug '21

11 Aug '21

The discussion in the other thread is very interesting (thanks Russell and Nicklas for the descriptions of your projects!) but I realised that it is about strategies and unless we agree on the goals then we will be talking past each other. Here are some example goals: - a living museum exhibit People would be able to experience Self as it was when it came out. This has a serious educational value. Back in 2000 I met a professor who taught a course on programming languages and he dedicated two full lessons to Self. I invited him to visit my office and gave him a demo of the language and he was completely shocked. I showed him outliners for doubly linked lists updating themselves as we tried different expressions as well as the GUI demos. He was teaching his students all the technical details about Self but could not imagine was the experience of actually using it was like. Alan Kay and Long Tien Nguyen imagined a way that people decades from now might experience was Smalltalk-72 was like: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf Dan Ingalls and friends have brought back to life old Smalltalks so people can try them out instead of just reading about them: https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/ - fun with retrocomputing Some people like to mix the convenience of the current world with the interesting stuff from the past. So they might have a Commodore 64 computer but load the software from a SD Card instead of audio tape. When playing around with Smalltalk-78 the group was amazed at how practical it was given current screen resolution and memory sizes, so they decided to fix things that had been originally been left unfinished and to add a bit of new functionality. Russell's efforts with ourself.io and new code he is adding to the snapshot is very much like this. - back to life Apple did very little with the Smalltalk it got from Xerox for participating in the project with DEC, HP and Tektronix. It just sat there bitrotting until the Squeak project. It gained sound, color and networking to start with. Certainly Self could do the same and become an alternative to Squeak/Cuis/Pharo. This would require better integration with the current computing world as well as enhancements. The privacy thing was set aside in Self 3, for example, with the idea that it would later "be done right" in Us (or Korz). What other goals would make sense for Self? -- Jecel

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future of the Self VM
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 03 Aug '21

03 Aug '21

Russell's talk this past Wednesday was really great! I liked the idea of starting of with a demo building a slide viewer to use for the rest of the talk. One of the slides was about options for moving the VM forward. I remember at least some of the alternatives - please add any that I forgot. I would mention that a very significant reason Self never became popular was that it didn't run on machines people had (a problem shared with nearly all the Unix clones that came before Linux). This was why many people wrote their own Self variations or Self inspired languages in the early days. I actually bought a Sun Ultra 5 machine in 1998 (the most money I have spent in my life so far) so I could continue to use Self after I moved away from the University. Just a few years later with Self running on PowerPC Macs and later x86 Macs and Linux machines people could finally try Self. Sadly, they didn't because of the silly idea that only things coming out right now are worth looking into. With everybody moving to x86-64 and now also Apple ARM we are back where we started! So how do we fix this? - changing the C++ VM to handle 64 bits and target the currently popular processors During the talk I mentioned the lack of progress in the StrongTalk VM as an example of how hard this is because you need developers who both like C++ and Smalltalk/Self. I was a nice surprise to be contradicted by George Cox who said he is actually working on StrongTalk: https://github.com/gjvc/strongtalk-2020 The move from 32 bits to 64 bits in Squeak happened twice (first at HP and then with Eliot Miranda). That wasn't an absurd amount of work and even though there was some advantages in using Slang instead of C++ it is likely to be doable for the Self VM. Adding x86-64 to a compiler that already can generate x86 code is another reasonable project. Supporting the ARM64 would require a larger effort. - do a Graal/Truffle implementation While I have no more interest in programming in Java than in C++, this is actually an interesting option. The TruffleSqueak project had nice results for (I might be wrong) a student-level effort. And with their Polyglot project the various languages can work together in a very nice way. I think partial evaluation will be an important technology in future compiling VMs, but I don't know enough about Graal to evaluate this alternative. - patch OpenSmalltalk VM (Cog) used for NewSpeak, Squeak, Pharo and Cuis to support Self This is something that I strongly recommended to the Slate guys even before Cog. I showed how a little tweak would allow multiple dispatch to be added to the VM. Many things needed to support prototypes (maps instead of classes, for example) don't actually make a difference at the VM level and so would require no changes. The way closures are handled in Cog and in the Self 4.1 bytecodes (previous Selves used message passing instead) are very different and Self needs to distinguish between implicit self sends and sends to "self". Resends a slightly more tricky than super. Recently Cog has implemented support for multiple bytecode sets in the same image in order to support Sista. Note that Cog itself is a dynamic compilation system and it is the addition of Sista that makes it an adaptive compiler more comparable to the Self VM. While there is VM support for Sista in the form of an alternative bytecode set it mostly exists in the image and so wouldn't help a Self system running on Cog. - Klein The OOPSLA 2005 paper on Klein (available to ACM members) include the video fo the talk by David Ungar, Alex Ausch and Adam Spitz (available to everyone): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1094855.1094865 One interesting thing in the talk was showing both Klein running inside Self (like the Squeak Simulator) as well as running on a separate computer (making it a SqueakNOS). I think it is a very interesting project that could be extended in worthwhile directions (like running on top of an operating system for those who like that sort of thing and handling multiple processors like the RoarVM). My first impression when trying to browse through Klein code was of some confusion. I soon found out that many of the methods I was looking at had been generated and that I needed to look at the sources for them instead. Is this actually the case? It was a while ago so I might be remembering it wrong. - inverse Klein I have no idea what this means. -- Jecel

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Self-interest August 2021