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Self: The Movie;

Jecel Assumpção Jr

61 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2020.
  • Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

21K views13 years ago3 recommendations

Programming languagesHistory and cultureLanguage design and type systemsHistory of computingObject-oriented design

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film demonstrating the Self programming language and its live, prototype-based graphical environment.

(C) 1995 Sun Microsystems, who has given people permission to redistribute this film as long as the copyright ownership is made clear. The Self programming language was developed initially as Stanford University (David Ungar and his students) and Xerox Parc (Randy Smith). It is a simple and powerful version of the Smalltalk language. The project moved to Sun in 1990 and continued there with some interruptions until 2006. See selflanguage.org/ for downloads and more information about the language. This movie was available until recently on Google Video. smalltalk.org.br/movies/self.html includes links to other sources.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently share this video as a classic demonstration of a highly interactive, unified programming and GUI environment.

sillysaurusxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Organizing Programs Without Classes (1991) [pdf]”

Related, and worth a watch: link to this video It's a video about the Self language, which I think was designed using the principles in this paper. I like it because (like Oberon) it shows that programming and graphics can be much more closely interwoven than we're used to. They were doing it in the 90's. Then we lost it somewhere along the way by trying to make everything big and user-facing.
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Fr0styMatt88on Hacker News • Recommends

On “In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)”

I'd point to the work done on tangible UIs and programming environments for that. For example, the work on tangible UIs eg- Self: link This is a good demo of what could be done in the Self environment: link to this video GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.
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muglugon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Self: the movie”

Here it is on YouTube (Quicktime movie didn't have sound for me). Quality isn't as high, though. link to this video
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pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Shadow DOM”

Mainly videos Self link to this video Xerox Star User Interface link link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System link The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link
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pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Web Starter Kit”

Self link to this video Xerox Star User Interface link link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System link The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC link The Mesa/Cedar programming environment link Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, link Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work link link link
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zaisteon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?”

I'm creating a Rails/Django equivalent in TypeScript called Huncwot 1. The project draws inspiration from Self 2 and aims to combine a framework, an editor and infrastructure into a unified programming environment. In other words, I'm on a quest for the Holy Grail of Programming. ;) 1: link 2: link to this video
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zaisteon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Show HN: Kretes – Build full-stack applications in TypeScript and PostgreSQL”

…ang 2 that seems to have a similar goal, but a different approach: Kretes builds on top of VS Code, and uses one of the most popular programming languages while DarkLang builds not only their editor from scratch, but they also introduced a new programming language. I find their project ambitious and inspiring - a potential game changer imho 1: link to this video 2: link…
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andaion Hacker News • Mentions

On “Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)”

I've heard it described as "Scheme in C's clothing." I remember reading something about how that's a misconception, but I can't recall where. On that note, does anyone have any resources or stories about Self? 0 (The language from which JS inherited prototypal inheritance.) 0 link to this video
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trashburgeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ambient Co-Presence”

This existed in the 90s! The Self programming language0 took Smalltalk's existing visual approach and extended it to be a full visual environment with interactive animations and physical metaphors, giving you a literal "desktop" to work on. Later versions of Self also supported working on a single "world" over the network, where the other users' objects and "hands" (cursors) would be visible to you. Here's an official movie released by Sun Microsystems: link to this video 0: link
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jecelon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas”

This reminds me of the "Kansas" environment in the Self programming language. Here is a video about it from Sun in 1995: link to this video More interesting search features were added after this video was made.
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