Self: The Movie;
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the canonical demo of Self's integrated, direct-manipulation environment whenever prototypal inheritance or live programming comes up.
What it is
A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2013 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec sillysaurusx · 2020-01 · on “Organizing Programs Without Classes (1991) [pdf]”
Related, and worth a watch: [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.
Recommends Fr0styMatt88 · 2016-09 · 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: [this video] GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.
Cites muglug · 2013-10 · on “Self: the movie”
Here it is on YouTube (Quicktime movie didn't have sound for me). Quality isn't as high, though. [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2014-04 · on “Shadow DOM”
Mainly videos Self [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]
Cites pjmlp · 2014-06 · on “Web Starter Kit”
Self [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]
Cites zaiste · 2020-03 · 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]: [this video]
Cites zaiste · 2020-06 · on “Show HN: Kretes – Build full-stack applications in TypeScript and PostgreSQL”
I'd like to tightly combine a semi-visual programming editor, the tooling and the runtime/infrastructure into one «thing» as shown in this video [1]. You write a bit of code, you drag and drop another bit, and almost instantly it becomes «online» - the compilation / the deployment process are somehow hidden and the configuration is minimal. It just works, so you can focus on solving the actual business needs of your application - but that's a long term vision... ;) I must mention DarkLang [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 scra
Cites andai · 2021-07 · 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] [this video]