[self-interest] Paper on Traits.

Jan-Paul Bultmann janpaulbultmann at me.com
Sun Sep 25 18:37:11 UTC 2011


Hm, to our understanding for example #6085035 covers technology used in Self as well :/

Cheers Jan
On Sep 25, 2011, at 20:25 PM, David Ungar wrote:

> 
> The Self VM work was done jointly at Sun and Stanford. I would be surprised if any Sun patents involved it. The Sun patents were done later, as we were thinking about Java. 
> 
> -- David (tapped out on my iPhone; blame it for any typoze;-)
> 
> On Sep 25, 2011, at 11:22 AM, Jan-Paul Bultmann <janpaulbultmann at me.com> wrote:
> 
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> On Sep 25, 2011, at 19:51 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>> 
>>>  
>>> Jan-Paul,
>>> 
>>> It is very important to note that some words are used in different ways
>>> in different projects. Otherwise you can have some very confusing
>>> discussions.
>>> 
>>> "Traits" in Self come from Adele Goldberg's teaching scheme for early
>>> Smalltalk where she purposely used different words than the standard
>>> jargon to informally introduce ideas before moving on to the actual
>>> details for the language. So she would first get people to think about
>>> which "traits" an object might have before showing them the "class" that
>>> implemented the idea.
>>> 
>>> Beyond "traits", Self also has "mixins". These names are just
>>> conventions and at the language level we just have parent objects, but
>>> the different names indicate the different intent behind these objects.
>>> 
>>> Several languages, including Strongtalk which evolved from Self, have
>>> "mixins" as an important feature. So when the research group at Bern
>>> decided to add to Squeak a modified version of "mixins", they decided to
>>> use a different name so their changes wouldn't be overlooked. That is
>>> what "traits" in Squeak or Pharo are. This has been copied in several
>>> other projects and languages and so is currently what is normally
>>> understood by the term. This is, however, different from what is
>>> described in the paper that David indicated.
>>> 
>>> Back when JIT implementations were less common, one term that caused a
>>> lot of confusion was "compiler". For Smalltalk-80 the term meant the
>>> source the bytecode translation program while for Self that was called
>>> the "parser" and "compiler" meant the bytecode to native machine code
>>> translator instead.
>>> 
>>> > Btw, Davidmay I humbly ask you on your thoughts on Io as a language ^^?
>>> > Another grab bag one, or maybe a worthy successor to Self if enhanced
>>> > with its Environment ;)?
>>> 
>>> I am not David (either one ;-) , but I have been a part of the Io
>>> community since the very beginning. This is another case of the same
>>> words being used differently and causing confusion. Io comes from the
>>> Newtonscript tradition of "prototypes", not the Self style. Even Steve
>>> Dekorte was confused about this for a very long time, and I can't blame
>>> him since when I first read "The Power of Simplicity" paper I also
>>> imagined something like Io rather than what Self actually is. But those
>>> ideas are actually from Henry Lieberman's 1986 "Using Prototypical
>>> Objects to Implement Shared Behavior in Object-Oriented Systems" paper
>>> instead.
>>> 
>>> 
>> Yeah the naming clash is amazing especially when one works with projects that used terms before everybody else did^^
>> Thanks for the insight on the different origins :D
>> 
>>> While I like Io, it has never had the kind of implementation technology
>>> that Self has always had and which recently has also come to Javascript.
>>> 
>> Yeah we're kinda working on that with the recent acute implementation^^
>> One problem with this is though that Oracle still holds a lot of Davids original patents so were a bit hesitant about implementing all the power of Self.
>> Most of them run out in 2014 I think, there are a lot of projects though that are bold enough to simply implement them, but with Oracles recent suing happines its kinda difficult ^^
>> 
>>> That community is actually smaller and currently less active than the
>>> Self one, so I wouldn't expect world domination from that direction any
>>> time soon.
>>> 
>> Smaller yes, less active no. :) You should really visit the #io channel on irc.freenode.net
>> 
>> Io has the advantage that it is conceptually simpler than Self, so there are more concepts that can arise out of a small base language, like resends and annotations.
>> There are vastly parts missing though like Morphic and the Image. But it has a far superior concurrency model.
>> Interestingly we can get a Self like look with acute ^^ by encouraging small number of arguments and having a single arg syntax.
>> list(1,2,3) at:1 data
>> list(1,2,3) at:1 put:5
>> As at: returns a listIndex.
>> 
>> Currently we are working on a VM for Prototype languages, it could be interesting to combine the small working force of the Self and Io communities.
>> When lookup is just a slot on Objects (as we plan to do it) it would be trivial to implement different Inheritance models and thus support both languages :) the rest is just syntax^^
>> 
>> Cheers Jan
>>> 
>>> -- Jecel
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 

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