[self-interest] Self style using JavaScript prototypal inheritance

David Ungar ungar at me.com
Thu May 12 12:22:12 UTC 2016


Good point about storage. Maybe if the project had not been canceled. Or if I'd found other funding...

- David (from iPad, typos likely)

> On May 11, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Russell Allen mail at russell-allen.com [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> There’s Haskell joke that computation should be the evaluation of typed pure functions but that programming should be the destructive updating of mutable untyped character strings (i.e. ’source code’).
> 
> The equivalent for OO and in particular prototype OO systems I think is the idea that computation is live communicating objects but programming is writing a static description of those objects at one point in time in some sort of descriptive language.
> 
> Where Self gets it right is the immediacy of morphic built on the flexibility of the Self language and VM. Where it gets it wrong is I think the same as where Smalltalk-80 gets it wrong - it’s half-way to an Operating System but doesn’t take that last jump. What I mean is not so much that Self should have device drivers or be its own kernel but that Self doesn’t have a storage story (it uses the filesystem - someone else’s story) or a sharing story (any object can metastasise and destroy the whole organism)
> 
> (This is ignoring the more technical limitations of the current version of Self, e.g. 32bit only, doesn’t take advantage of multiple cores etc)
> 
> (The other place I get the feeling of not just using a system but living within it is the unix command line)
> 
> So to make a JS system more ‘successful’ in the Self sense I’d look at Dan Ingalls’ Lively Kernel and its offshoots. The aim would be to get users to feel like they are building lego or interacting with a live system, and not writing an essay, a set of instructions to be obeyed or a architectural blueprint.
> 
> Russell
> 
>> On 12 May 2016, at 8:03 AM, David Harris dpharris at telus.net [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>> Success does not need to only be in terms of number of users.  Self is successful on many levels.  For example, it has influenced may projects including JIT compilers for other languages, and its UI has also influenced other systems.  
>> 
>> David
>> 
>> 
>>> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Bystroushaak bystrousak at kitakitsune.org [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>  > What it doesn't have is a Self-oriented guide, how to tease out of JS
>>>  > the success of Self.
>>> 
>>> Uh eh. I do not intend to offend anyone, but how did you get the
>>> impression that Self is successful?
>>> 
>>> Don't get me wrong, I like Self and I am activelly trying to learn it,
>>> but as far as I know it is almost dead project with maybe 10 people in
>>> world actually still using it outside of academia.
>>> 
>>> Compared to JavaScript, it seems to me that it is totally un-successfull.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ------------------------------------
>>> Posted by: Bystroushaak <bystrousak at kitakitsune.org>
>>> ------------------------------------
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ------------------------------------
>>> 
>>> Yahoo Groups Links
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
> 
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