Smalltalk and Self

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Aug 30 15:52:13 UTC 2005


Alan Lovejoy wrote on Mon, 29 Aug 2005 15:15:08 -0700
> ShiningRay @ Nirvana> "But I haven't seen many actions of SELF development.
> > I cannot find any application written in SELF. why?" 

Several applications have been developed in Self, but all of them part
of someones's PhD thesis. Most aren't available for download and so
aren't particularly visible on the net (in no particular order):

Ole Agesen: Mango (A Parser Generator for Self)
Albertina Lourenci: EcoDesign (CAD for architecture with tiling)
James Noble: Tarraingím (A Program Animation Environment)
Ivan Moore: Guru (refactoring system - http://selfguru.sourceforge.net/)
Reinaldo Silveira: SelfHDL (simulation system for integrated circuits)

That two of the associated texts are in Portuguese certainly doesn't
help with the visibility issue. Sorry if I missed anyone.

> Might as well ask why C++, Java, Visual Basic, Perl and Python are generally
> used in preference to Smalltalk by most development projects. 

Napoleon (among others) said "don't attribute to malice what can be
explained by incompetence". While Smalltalk suffered greatly at
Digitalk-ParcPlace due to incompetence over the Java hype machine, Self
had to endure malice within Sun. I can understand a company wanting to
be 100% behind a given technology and cutting back on the rest (think
Apple and the Newton for an example) and the core Self team was actually
allowed to linger on for a couple of years before being relocated to the
Java group. But on the marketing side I was very surprised at the
hostile reaction of some Sun people at the mention of Self (well, after
explaining what it was since they hadn't heard of it before).

Only after 2000 did things become more reasonable at Sun and development
of Self and variations was restarted and now you have things like
Fortress. They are no longer counting on a "one language to rule them
all" future.

> One issue with Self is the lack of either a commercial IDE with major vendor
> support or a Squeak-like open source development project for the language and IDE.
> Self has always resembled more a research project than a serious attempt at a
> production-ready development platform. 

I don't understand - Sun wasn't able to utterly kill Self in 1995
because they *had* previously released it all as open source. A major
problem was that you needed a Sparc workstation to use it. I bought an
Ultra 5 in 1998 just to run it but am probably the only one in the world
who would do that. Several attempts to port it to x86 Linux in the 1990s
didn't get very far as the VM was a very large C++ program. Squeak's
design was in part a reaction to these problems. Only in 2000 did Sun
decide to release a Mac port that had been done quite a while before and
this refactored code finally did get ported to the PC a little later.
The Sparc is still the best machine on which to run Self, however.

Self has its share of bugs but no more than Squeak, in my experience.
And while StrongTalk was supposed to bring Self's technologies to a
production quality system I don't think they did produce a vast
improvement.

-- Jecel



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