>Henrik --
>
>Your wish is my command ...
>
>There are many excellent ideas in Self and we should celebrate all such
>attempts at making better languages and programming environments. As you
>mentioned, some of them were early themes in OOP and in the development of
>Smalltalk -- but it doesn't matter so much where good ideas come from as
>much as them being good, and for them to appear.

[...]

>So, there are many things to like about Self. The aspects of Self I found
>less appealing were those that dealt with meta-issues like "classness",
>inheritance, underlying frameworks, reflection, etc. Here I felt that Self
>was too LISP-like, and didn't do a great job of either protecting its
>metasystem or of representing it.
>     For example, classes don't have to be put in opposition to prototypes.
>Both are great ideas and both are needed. Why "classness" if you have
>prototypes?

Also, Jerry Archibald (JArchibald at aol.com) wrote:

>In a Self oriented environment, however, the number of distinct behaviors is
>not governed by the number of classes which form the system, but the number
>of instances. Each instance will have a distinct behavior determined by the
>signature which is "pertinant" to that object. If you argue that "Well, many
>of them have the same (or similar) behavior" I would argue in return that
>"Well, you are just reintroducing the Class concept by doing that."

Interestingly, I found this paragraph in a paper about Glyphic:

>Keeping Classes
>We never found the need to remove the concept of class from the system:
>The concept of class works well as an organizing principle in libraries
>and programs.
>While the development environment and libraries talk of classes,
>these are really prototype objects and the language semantics do not
>treat them any differently. Instead of eliminating classes, Glyphic Script
>demystifies them and makes them truly regular object.

The whole document is at:
http://www.glyphic.com/papers/oopsla94.html

Bye
Adriano