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Haha ... funny to read about people scratching their head over Self. I feel like once you've wrapped your head around the Squeak version of Smalltalk, your abou
by secstate 13y ago
Haha ... funny to read about people scratching their head over Self. I feel like once you've wrapped your head around the Squeak version of Smalltalk, your about 50% of the way towards understanding Self. It's not a language the way we think of it, with CLI tools and syntax and text editors. It is a mutable environment of programmable objects. Sure there's some writing inside of objects to create methods, but you're not gonna find a "try this in the browser" code.
Self is/was http://noflojs.org/ http://noflojs.org/ 's grandfather.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEKO7JcmLE
I would also argue that Self is to programming languages what Haiku is to OS development. No on is writing a web framework in self, it's more of a toy and a neat artifact of where programming has been and could go in the future.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoSmalltalk is still class based. The only strong connection between Self and Squeak is Morphic.
- secstate 13y agoI stand corrected :)
- russellallen 13y agoMuch of the syntax is similar too: (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ Transcript show: 'Yay!' ] "Squeak" (2 + 4) == 5 ifTrue: [ 'Yay!' printLine ] "Self"
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoC and Java also have a similar syntax. Most of the Self people were Smalltalk people before, so you could see Self as being heavily inspired by Smalltalk in its syntax and image-based persistence. However Squeak is still Smalltalk while Self is a full successor language (you could say Morphic was backported from Self back to Smalltalk).
- tel 13y agoI feel like my personal challenges coming to understand Self are often exaggerated by Morphic. Most of the linguistic notions I gather from reading papers aren't too tough, but I always bounce off when trying to translate that to effects in the Self environment.
- doublec 13y agoI encounter that too. I started writing Self code in a text editor and loading it in the REPL. Some of the code shipped with Self is like this (The Mango parser code for example). Once I was more familiar I started learning the GUI environment. It took me a while to work out how the object transporter worked to export code back to text files but once I got that Self became a lot more friendly to use.
- tel 13y agoSee, I'd love to do that but I don't think the documentation ever bothers to explain it.
- sebastianconcpt 13y agoA.K.A. UI poorly solved usability challenges. In a way, the fundamentals of Self is the future of programming but we need to get designers helping with the UI/UX Smalltalk has a similar challenge
- doublec 13y agoThere is actually a basic web server example. It includes a web based object browser. I'm not sure if it's in the 4.5.0 release but it's one of the branches IIRC.
- steveklabnik 13y agoThey mean you won't find something like http://tryruby.org http://tryruby.org
- qznc 13y agoIt is done for Smalltalk. Why not for Self? http://amber-lang.net/ http://amber-lang.net/