New release of Self programming language • Hacker News Board

Re: New release of Self programming language

#21

Post by DonbunEf7 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 9:35 AM UTC

bhk wrote: post #5

Can we ever get away from the misnomer of "prototype-based OO"? In Self we have two ways of specialization: 1. Prototypes 2. Parents Prototypes are objects that are "cloned" to create instances, a very simple and direct notion of inheritance. We create an object (a "prototype") with properties that apply to a larger set of objects, and then for each instance we copy (clone) it and then add or modify properties as nec…

Relax already.

We say "prototype" to indicate an important feature of Self which its children (Python, JavaScript, etc.) inherited: Unlike classes, prototypes are open for modification. The precise mechanisms differ between the different languages in Self's family, but they all have that feature in common.

Compare and contrast with other Smalltalk children, like Java or E, where this isn't possible because classes are closed. (E doesn't have classes, but it has a similar property, in that object literal scripts are closed for modification.)

Re: New release of Self programming language

#22

Post by saurik » Thu, May 25, 2017, 9:53 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Wow. For those who don't know, there was a big 'language bake off' at Sun between TCL, Java, and Self (all being funded by Sun Labs) and Bert Sutherland (then director of Sun Labs and brother of Ivan) required that the language changes stop and then we'd look at each one, and decide which one to move forward on. When the world sort of exploded at the WWW conference held in Darmstadt Germany in 1995, Java officially '…

Do you know what caused Java to "win" when the world exploded?

Re: New release of Self programming language

#23

Post by saurik » Thu, May 25, 2017, 9:58 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #20

krallja wrote: post #3

Self (along with Scheme) was supposedly one of the big influences on Brendan Eich when he was creating JavaScript. Neat to know it's still out there.

> Self (along with Scheme) was supposedly one of the big influences on Brendan Eich when he was creating JavaScript. That's really doubtful. Self's delegation-based inheritance was expedient for quickly implementing an object model instead of having to build a class system, the influence never seems to have gone any deeper. The one big influence on Javascript was Scheme, that was the original idea, when Netscape's ex…

The global object in JavaScript is also a scope and serves essentially the same purpose as the lobby in Self, and you can feel the same mechanism in play in JavaScript's with() statement.

Re: New release of Self programming language

#24

Post by patrec » Thu, May 25, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

Has someone here got some examples of things that are more neatly expressed in self than javascript and other obvious suspects (e.g. python, racket, common lisp, smalltalk)?

Re: New release of Self programming language

#25

Post by russellallen » Thu, May 25, 2017, 10:18 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #20

krallja wrote: post #3

Self (along with Scheme) was supposedly one of the big influences on Brendan Eich when he was creating JavaScript. Neat to know it's still out there.

> Self (along with Scheme) was supposedly one of the big influences on Brendan Eich when he was creating JavaScript. That's really doubtful. Self's delegation-based inheritance was expedient for quickly implementing an object model instead of having to build a class system, the influence never seems to have gone any deeper. The one big influence on Javascript was Scheme, that was the original idea, when Netscape's ex…

Brendan himself says:

I’m not proud, but I’m happy that I chose Scheme-ish first-class functions and Self-ish (albeit singular) prototypes as the main ingredients. The Java influences, especially y2k Date bugs but also the primitive vs. object distinction (e.g., string vs. String), were unfortunate.

https://brendaneich.com/2008/04/popularity/

Re: New release of Self programming language

#26

Post by russellallen » Thu, May 25, 2017, 10:21 AM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #2

No Windows release. Hmm.

It's on the list but a big task because of the Unix assumptions build into the VM and the need to redo the graphics backend both as primitives and to hook it into the Self level GUI framework.

Re: New release of Self programming language

#27

Post by doublec » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:10 AM UTC

patrec wrote: post #24

Has someone here got some examples of things that are more neatly expressed in self than javascript and other obvious suspects (e.g. python, racket, common lisp, smalltalk)?

I'm not sure about comparing to those languages but I did a post comparing other prototype based languages https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2009/07/16/prototype-based-program...

For me though it's not about the Self language but about the combination of the language and environment. I did a screencast attempting to show some of how Self development is done https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/11/18/demo-of-programming-in-...

Re: New release of Self programming language

#28

Post by specialist » Thu, May 25, 2017, 11:20 AM UTC

bhk wrote: post #5

Can we ever get away from the misnomer of "prototype-based OO"? In Self we have two ways of specialization: 1. Prototypes 2. Parents Prototypes are objects that are "cloned" to create instances, a very simple and direct notion of inheritance. We create an object (a "prototype") with properties that apply to a larger set of objects, and then for each instance we copy (clone) it and then add or modify properties as nec…

It's class-based vs instance-based.

Re: New release of Self programming language

#29

Post by hipitihop » Thu, May 25, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #19

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Wow. For those who don't know, there was a big 'language bake off' at Sun between TCL, Java, and Self (all being funded by Sun Labs) and Bert Sutherland (then director of Sun Labs and brother of Ivan) required that the language changes stop and then we'd look at each one, and decide which one to move forward on. When the world sort of exploded at the WWW conference held in Darmstadt Germany in 1995, Java officially '…

I believe that much of the work Sun had done on Self found its way to Java in the form of HotSpot.

Not to take anything from Self, but in regards to HotSpot, a more accurate history attributes the lineage to Smalltalk and the Animorphic team. Some details here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot

Re: New release of Self programming language

#30

Post by chubot » Thu, May 25, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #18

chubot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't get what's better about prototypes than classes. In particular, I don't see that the prototypal style is supported empirically. Are there any codebases around 100K to 1 M lines of code written in a prototypal style, which are actually in production use? You can claim thousands of such systems for classes. In that sense, classes are a success. That people write horrible class-based code isn't a knock…

Prototypes and metaclasses are equivalent in power, and both are more powerful than straight classes. You can do things like dynamically change the set of methods that an object responds to with them, something that you have to fake in a class-based system with the State or Strategy pattern. Also, because prototypes are just ordinary objects, you can do even fancier stuff like store the set of possible prototypes in…

Thanks for the response, but I wouldn't call that empirical support for prototypes. They took JIT technology developed for Self and applied it to a class-based language, Java. That doesn't mean that prototypes are good for writing programs. It actually indicates the opposite, because the technology in Self that ended up actually being deployed turned out to be something else.

(I also worked at Google and am somewhat familiar with the Self to HotSpot to v8 heritage.)

Your second paragraph is exactly what I think is wrong with prototypes. There's not enough structure, and not enough constraint. Constraints are useful for reasoning about programs. You might as well just have a bunch of structs and function pointers (and certainly many successful programs are written that way).

Having every application roll its own class system is a terrible idea, in theory and in practice. In practice JavaScript programs end up with multiple class systems because of this. The Lua ecosystem also has this problem.

It's analogous to every library in C rolling their own event loop or thread pool, leading to a fragmenetation of concurrency approaches. Go and node.js both unify the approach to concurrency so every application doesn't end up with 3 different concurrency abstractions.

I don't buy your 3rd paragraph. Python is class-based; it has the characteristic you're talking about with respect to a small team of hackers; and that has been empirically supported by hundreds or thousands of startups being acquired (Instagram, etc.) and even huge companies created (Dropbox).

I honestly think prototypes have failed in the marketplace of ideas and there's a good reason for that. I use metaclasses all the time but not for dynamically changing sets of methods. That seems like a horrible idea. The way I use them is for generating types from external sources like CSV/SQL/protobuf schemas.