Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
>> ...Is it [...] hard to organize a big system without classes?
>No - you can simulate classes whenever you need them. 

That is one of the things I liked. I found it quite mind expanding to look
at classes in this light.

>I am not sure if 
>I understood John Maloney's objections in the great interview that 
>Tansel pointed out to you, 

(Thanks Tansel!)

>but I got the impression that he missed the 
>global and centralized system view that the browser gives you. Self's 
>outliners are like the Object Inspector in Squeak and are better for 
>giving you local views. Note that Squeak-like browsers could be built 
>in Self in an hour or so (as Mario Wolczko did in his Smalltalk 
>emulator).

John Maloney had one objection that was not obvious to me (probably because
I'm just starting looking at Self and I'm not ready to think about how system tools 
would be built): "Since the object relationships used to build the Self 
equivalent of Smalltalk's class library are merely a matter of convention, 
system tools cannot rely on them. Programmers are free to write programs 
that don't follow the conventions.  I think this is why, for example, Self has 
no equivalent to the Smalltalk's changes log and change set managers. 
These tools are much easier to write if you have the notion of "class" built 
into the language."

>...On the language design front, Alan Kay has complained in this list 
>about the "mixing of levels" in Self due to parent slots. Program 
>structure, which should be a meta-level issue (handled by mirror 
>objects, perhaps) becomes visible and changeable at the base-level. 
>This was actually a design goal for Self's creators, but it has little 
>impact in practice - if it were eliminated the code would only have to 
>be changed in about a dozen places in the image, half of which are 
>there mostly to demonstrate this feature.

I don't understand this issue (maybe I have not noticed any of these places
in the "Demo.snap" image that is distributed with Self for Linux release). 

Ted