[self-interest] Self history

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

On Monday 22 April 2002 11:27, Steve Dekorte wrote:
> What was Self's inspiration for using protos? Was it inspired by
> languages like Carl Hewitt's PLASMA?

The people who actually *know* the answer are here on this list, but 
might be having problems posting since Sun has reorganized its internal 
networks. So I'll give you a good *guess* instead:

In http://research.sun.com/self/papers/self-power.html they have three 
references to ThingLab (by Alan Borning), one to ACTORS (Hewitt and 
Agha) and another to the OOPSLA'86 paper "Using prototypical objects to 
implement shared behavior in object-oriented systems" (Henry Lieberman) 
when introducing the notion of prototypes. In the "related work" 
section they cite additional influences, including Examplars Smalltalk 
(LaLonde, Thomas and Pugh) and two references to ARK, the Alternate 
Reality Kit (Randall Smith).

If you read the ARK papers, you will see how the attempt to visually 
capture all aspects of Smalltalk (with the "factory door" pictures 
representing classes) didn't interest most users when they had more 
concrete alternatives (just put a "copy" button on top of an existing 
object).

-- Jecel