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Self: The Movie;

Jecel Assumpção Jr · 21.3K views · 2013-09-10 · 21:01

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Overview

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the canonical demo of Self's integrated, direct-manipulation environment whenever prototypal inheritance or live programming comes up.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2013–2024

Topics

Programming language designGUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computing
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selfsmalltalkprototypeslive programmingsun microsystems

What people said

sillysaurusx · 2020-01 · Strong recommendation

Related, and worth a watch: [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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Fr0styMatt88 · 2016-09 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO] GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.

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jecel · 2024-09 · Reference

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

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Sources

Video by Jecel Assumpção Jr, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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