Self wiki
The Power of Simplicity
See a short introduction to Self
Resources
- The most recent home page for the Self project
- The home page for the Self project at Sun
- The current Self mailing list
- The browsable archives from the previous Self mailing list (1990 to 1997) are available (also sorted by date).
- Please contribute to the FAQ
- The Self page at the Cetus site has more resources
- A Doxygen generated documentation for the C++ sources of the Self 4.1.2 virtual machine is available to help people study the code (which is downloadable from the links below)
Download
| System | Notes |
| Self 4.2 for Sparc | works with true color modes, new user interface elements |
| Self 4.2 for PowerMac | runs under Max OS X only (Jaguar), has both Carbon and X Window ui code, works with true color modes, new user interface elements, now has Polymorphic Inline Caches (PICs) and the optimizing compiler (SIC). See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/self-interest/message/1267 for instructions on how to make the Droplet work |
| Self 4.1.6 for Linux PC | alpha release, needs GLIBC_2.2, no SIC compiler |
| Self 4.1.6 for Windows | alpha release, needs cygwin and XFree86, no SIC compiler |
| Self 4.0 for Sparc | there is a SunOS and a Solaris version |
| Marvin | Self in Squeak Smalltalk |
| JSelf | Self in Java, unfinished |
| dSelf | a distributed Self in Java, papers (most in German) |
| OpenSelf | a simple Self implementation in C for Unix, pages and mailing list seem to have vanished |
| tinySelf 1 | a parallel Self written in Self, too buggy to run real programs |
| tinySelf 0 | a simple Self implementation in C for Unix, unfinished: nothing more than a parser |
Self: The Movie;
Randy Smith from Sun Microsystems has graciously given permission for downloadable versions of "Self: The Movie;". Please note that the copyright (1995) belongs to Sun and do not redistribute portions of this material in a way that doesn't make this copyright perfectly clear.The Quicktime versions are suitable for Macs and Windows but use an audio codec that doesn't work in the Linux applications I have tried. They were digitized by Steve Dekorte. Thanks, Steve!
The DivX versions can be seen with several different applications on Macs, Windows and Linux if you have the DivX decoder installed. They were digitized by Jecel Assumpção.
Movie Files
| Quicktime | Large (81MB) | very similar to the original VHS tape in quality |
| Small (30MB) | all screen captures are very fuzzy, but almost readable | |
| DivX | Large (198MB) | very similar to the original VHS tape in quality (coming soon) |
| Small (23MB) | screen captures are totally unreadable and even the live scenes are fuzzy. Only good for a preview in order to decide if it is worth downloading the better version |
Content
| 00:00 | Title |
| 00:16 | Randy's introduction: directness, liveness, no run/debug separation |
| 02:00 | demonstration of basic Self ideas |
| 02:15 | - objects and slots |
| 02:54 | - methods |
| 03:40 | - parent objects: inheritance |
| 04:33 | - flexibility of object inheritance (vs class inheritance) |
| 06:08 | Morphic demonstration |
| 07:48 | how to change a running program (bouncing atoms) |
| 10:53 | make it look like a "real" application |
| 15:06 | web browser in Self |
| 15:37 | Mario's Smalltalk in Self (also shown is collaboration via Self) |
| 16:46 | Dave talks to Randy about the implementation |
| 19:30 | Randy's conclusions |
| 20:45 | Credits |
Projects
- Guru is a tool for Self improvement (code refactoring)
- EcoDesign is a tool for sustainable Architecture
- Merlintec Computers used to make Self based processors and computers (currently uses Squeak Smalltalk)
Self-like languages
Most of the older prototype based languages we inspired by Self, including NewtonScript which was probably the most widely used of them all. A very interesting one that has been "missing in action" for many years is Kevo, but its files have been posted to the self-interest list (Mac only).Some Self-like languages still being developed are: