Self

• Authors: David Ungar;Randall B. Smith
• Venue: Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages
• Year: 2007

The years 1985 through 1995 saw the birth and development of the language Self, starting from its design by the authors at Xerox PARC, through first implementations by Ungar and his graduate students at Stanford University, and then with a larger team formed when the authors joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1991. Self was designed to help programmers become more productive and creative by giving them a simple, pure, and powerful language, an implementation that combined ease of use with high performance, a user interface that off-loaded cognitive burden, and a programming environment that captured the malleability of a physical world of live objects. Accomplishing these goals required innovation in several areas: a simple yet powerful prototype-based object model for mainstream programming, many compilation techniques including customization, splitting, type prediction, polymorphic inline caches, adaptive optimization, and dynamic deoptimization, the application of cartoon animation to enhance the legibility of a dynamic graphical interface, an object-centered programming environment, and a user-interface construction framework that embodied a uniform use-mention distinction. Over the years, the project has published many papers and released four major versions of Self. Although the Self project ended in 1995, its implementation, animation, user interface toolkit architecture, and even its prototype object model impact computer science today (2006). Java virtual machines for desktop and laptop computers have adopted Self's implementation techniques, many user interfaces incorporate cartoon animation, several popular systems have adopted similar interface frameworks, and the prototype object model can be found in some of today's languages, including JavaScript. Nevertheless, the vision we tried to capture in the unified whole has yet to be achieved.