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Having played with Self a bit before the Newton came out and then seeing it in NewtonScript, it was a very cool thing to watch the idea of system-wide prototype
by evgen 7y ago
Having played with Self a bit before the Newton came out and then seeing it in NewtonScript, it was a very cool thing to watch the idea of system-wide prototype-based inheritance filter through the community. I think it was a bit too much for most people to grok, but the ability of a coder to modify only a few prototypes in the system soup to change the behavior of existing apps was absolutely amazing.
- jakear 7y agoContrast to nowadays where people mainly seem to view it as a source of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Which is true and reasonable, but a shame. I always like monkey-patching, at least in small personal projects. But if you want to distribute anything, you end up needing to go back and remove all of it. .
- jacobush 7y agoSomething similar in thought (but less generic), was the concept of "datatypes" in AmigaOS. It meant software could seamlessly import and export data in formats even though it had no knowledge of its internal representation. A word processor could include for instance PNG images even though PNG was not even invented when the word processor was created!